Would a 260 Core or a 4870 provide a notable increase over a 8800gts640?

[PhatoseAlpha]

I'm not really one for cranking AA - I can deal with no AA more then most people. The 8800 seems to be showing it's age, but to be honest, finding reviews where they have directly comparable results for recent stuff that also goes as far back as the 8800's has proven difficult.

How much of a performance boost could I plan on seeing? I do have an SLI capable motherboard, so I suppose adding in a second 8800 is also an option, though I've heard multi-gpu setups can be iffy, and I'm not sure my power supply could handle it.

Any advice? Or links to benchies that include those cards?

 

[AzN]

See a difference sure. Worth the money? Probably not. About 1.5x faster than your 8800gts.

 

[apoppin]

Originally posted by: PhatoseAlpha
I'm not really one for cranking AA - I can deal with no AA more then most people. The 8800 seems to be showing it's age, but to be honest, finding reviews where they have directly comparable results for recent stuff that also goes as far back as the 8800's has proven difficult.

How much of a performance boost could I plan on seeing? I do have an SLI capable motherboard, so I suppose adding in a second 8800 is also an option, though I've heard multi-gpu setups can be iffy, and I'm not sure my power supply could handle it.

Any advice? Or links to benchies that include those cards?

i have a comparison with 2900xt [the equal of 8800GTS] and 8800GTX vs 4870 and GTX280 at 16x10 and 19x12. Frankly your card barely cuts it for 16x10 if you play DX10 games. A 4870 or better would make it very playable. You could consider a 2nd 8800GTS in SLi that will bring your system up to a single 4870's performance.
My 2900xt crossfire was about 10% slower than a single 4870

 

[cusideabelincoln]

^Or, apoppin, he could just look at AT's review for the score of an HD3850/HD3870, close equals to the HD2900XT

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3341&p=13

Performance increase of HD4870 512MB vs. HD3870 (which should be a good equal, probably faster, card to the GTS 640MB) @ 1900x1200
Crysis: 60.5%
CoD4: 111.2%
ET-QW: 106.8%
AC: 36.8%
Witcher: 85.3%
Bioshock: 66.7%
Oblivion: 66.7%

If you want a direct comparision, the only thing you're really going to find is tomshardware.com's graphics charts, but I always takes those results with a grain of salt. Why you ask? Well, just look at ATs review and this score for an HD4870 in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. They are using pretty much the exact same setup and are getting pretty close scores for other cards like the HD3870 (46 fps in AT's review, 48 at tomshardware), but the HD4870 scores 90 fps at anandtech while only getting 64 fps at tom's, which is barely more than an HD4850 in their scores. So yeh, there are a lot of inconsistencies with those charts.

 

[PhatoseAlpha]

With no vista, DX10 is a non-options. Looks considerable, but not quite worth the $300 investment. Maybe I'll upgrade the processor instead.

 

[Denithor]

$300 investment? Ouch. Sell your 8800GTS and get a 4870 or GTX 260 from eBay with the Microsoft Live Cashback program (see the post in the Hot Deals Forum for details). I got the GTX 260 in my gaming rig for $168 shipped that way.

BTW, you've already got a 2.5GHz dual core processor, a CPU upgrade from that will have much less impact in most games than an equal amount of money spent on a newer GPU. And you're going to have to upgrade your CPU/MOBO/RAM in order to get any faster CPU in your system (Opty 165 is s939 which isn't supported anymore and uses DDR while all processors today require DDR2).