I got a brand new GeForce 7900GT OC from BFG Tech a couple days ago!
It was an amazing bargain at 180$ And an amazing step up from my old Nvidia GeForce 7300LE!
To give you an idea of the difference heres a comparison of my old card and my new one http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php ... &card2=384
Though I think the next chance I get I'll get an extra gig of RAM so I can play Oblivion and F.E.A.R better.

mmm.. sweet!

Your starting to creep me out with those mmm...'s

I think he wants some M & M's

Nice card, but not too sure about the price, you get a 8600 GT for around $150.

Never take ATIs. Actually they have better performance than GFs and a lot of extra shiny features, but in real life nearly 50% of games happen to suffer from lots of minor ATi incompatibility issues. I know what I'm saying, for I have been having ATi cards for more than 7 years, but soon will be moving to 8800.

the 8800 rocks.

I was wondering about that. I thought I read somewhere that ATi was better performance wise compared to GF, but I did have quite a few graphical bugs because of my ATi. Thank you for the insight, I will use that knowledge to my advantage when I upgrade (eventually...).

Don't move to the 8800, Baklajan. If your current card is pretty fast, I'd hold out until the next generation arrives. It will have more stable DX10 support along with vast increase in horsepower.

yeah, and it'll suck your wallet dry. The next gen cards will be like a grand each, they be like a terrabyte or something of stuff going through them.

Hell no. Three times as much computing power doesn't mean triple performance boost. Remember how 8800 SLI made almost no difference as compared to 8800 solo in Oblivion 8800 is supposed to be 1,5 times as fast as 7800 however when it comes practice we see quite another picture. So next gen will be probably 1,5-2 times faster than 8800... Also, next gen GPUs are supposed to appear in December. Though no mention was made by Nvidia when these GPUs would be made into a fully-functional retail product.

When something appears at a price of $599 in the West, three months later it appears at a price of $1300 in my country. Prices for Nvidia next-gen cards won't get civilized until early 2009 here. By the way, in Moscow a 8800GTX costs $400 now, but nine months ago the price was $950!

So I better buy a whole new computer for $2200 with a Core Duo processor and a 8800GTX on board, which will be enough for me to survive some year or two without having to up-grade. I hope that in late 2008 next-gen Nvidia cards will become available here at sane prices like $400-$600... You know, I've missed a lot of great games because of my studies; I was never able to finish F.E.A.R., Prey, Quake IV and what not. Also I'm looking forward to replaying Far Cry, Painkiller and stuff like that for 5th or 6th time. This kind of stuff doesn't require next gen cards, however my good old Radeon X800XT PE can't run those smoothly enough with everything set to Insanely Ultra High with 8x AA at widescreen resolutions, and I always wanted to play my old faves at highest settings possible.

And I do hate Windows Vista. I won't be installing it until they come and force me to with the help of a shotgun. I'll get a good chance to play Crysis in 2009 or 2011, so I don't mind being a year or two late for it. BTW, it'll sure get patched and fixed to the limit by that time Maybe I'll have both XP and Vista on my new computer, but most likely I'll be too lazy to download it and mess with all the hacks and cracks (In Russia, there's a tradition never to use legal software, so I have no idea how one can get a legal copy of Vista in my country; and I'm risking being put into a madhouse for asking that question to my friends)

But my real reason for moving to 8800 is that my current X800XT crap has a huge grudge against S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and most games by EA, let alone the fact that it freaks out in a way or another in almost any game I had so far! I wasn't playing much for the last three years, but I won't be able to survive weekends without a 8800 for another year - I'm not expecting this next gen stuff to appear here earlier than May 2008. Oh, I just forget to say that the newer ATi drivers are, the weirder glitches you get That was the rule since the first Catalyst package appeared.

Don't confuse SLi with single GPU mode. SLi is a ripoff but not single GPU setup, you get the performance you paid for in the latter case assuming you know a thing or two about setting up a PC.

I mean that two 8800s should give at least 50-75% performance boost, while in Oblivion they gave no more than 15%, and even after all patches and driver updates the difference between one and two 8800s is no more than 30%... Though technically SLI means double computing power, that doesn't mean double performance.

Also an average Radeon X1900 card's computing power is 475 Teraflops and a 8800 is only 330 Teraflops, but when it comes to performance they're roughly equal

So tales about thrice as much Teraflops in next gen cards don't inspire much awe into me...

I share the same opinion about SLi, it is a good way for nVidia to rip off their customers. Same goes for ATi's Crossfire.

Plus, who the hell needs two 8800s?

The deal is not about SLI, but about the fact that if Nvidia says 'our next gen cards will have three times as much computing power as 8800 do' that doesn't mean 'our next gen cards will give you triple performance in games as compared to that of a 8800'

Nvidia and ATi have been telling tales for ages, I no longer trust their advertisments. A 8800 is roughly 2,5 times as powerful as a 7800 however a 8800 clearly doesn't give you 2,5 times as much FPS as compared to a 7800...

I never look at advertisements, I just check out the specs of each card and draw conclusions from there.

Huh, usually specs say about the same computing power in Teraflops and senseless stuff alike. Specs don't tell you of actual performance... while in-game tests do.

Guess what, clock speeds, memory amount and bitsizes do tell about a card's power very accurately. What is not accurate is if game engines utilize the extra power effectively.

Then why a 475 Tfps ATi card gives a performance roughly equal to that of a 330 Tfps Nvidia? Besides that, a fact remains a fact - take a 7800 and a 8800 and see how 8800 doesn't give you two times and a half as many fps though it should, according to the specs. Of course next gen cards will be a lot faster than 8800, but if Nvidia says that they will have 1000 Tfps instead of 8800's 330 Tfps, that doesn't mean they'll be 300% as fast. Most likely 50 or maybe 65%, as it used to be since the day one.

I'm not familiar with the term teraflop, but I know for a fact 512 MBs of vRAM means the card has twice more vRAM than 256 MBs one, and a card with 2 GHz memory clock has the potential to do 4x more memory processing per second than a 500 MHz one.

There are countless factors that affect performance. If a card manufacturer says it is exactly 2.5x faster than another card in all cases imaginable, it is pure bullshit. Sometimes it is 2x faster, sometimes 1.875235x, etc.
It's based on the computer, the game in question, temperature of the core processor, and I can go on and on.

I got a crappy ATI Radeon X600 lol

Just got an Nvidia 8800 Ultra XFX SHE-9 768 Mb for only $880, an Intel Core Quad CPU and 2 Gb of brand Corsair memory with EPP support. Thwack me.

If you had a link in the US, you could ask him/her to buy the 8800 Ultra from NewEgg for you, it costs around $600 - 650 there.

It would normally cost exactly the same here in Russia, but recently the dollar had a huge drop but the hardware retailers decided to keep the rouble prices the same. So $600 turned into $800, still equal to 22,000 roubles. Since our salary sizes aren't hard-linked to the dollar, I lost nothing.

Also I doubt that the SHE-9 version of 8800 Ultra-XFX would cost 500-600 in US, it's an overclocked variant of the regular 8800 Ultra XFX SHF-9 with a slightly improved cooling system. If I'm not mistaken only Nvidia issues original SHE-9 cards while other brands resell reference cards built on the SHF-9 basis.

Sending something like a 8800 from US to RF would be very costly... hardware taxes and such stuff... otherwise everybody here would be buying hardware via internet in US. And of course, I still want my 3 years of warranty with an option to call the emergency engineer home so that he takes the card for repair if something goes wrong. Would be problematic for a card purchased some five thousand miles away.

I have a 7800 GT in my computer. It works like a dream. Hope your 7900 does too.

I was thinking of getting an 8800 GTS, but then realized that it sadly won't fit in my computer case.

I'm going to wait until the Quad-Core Barcelona processors come out, so that all the prices drop, before getting a whole new computer and a brand new 8800. By then, the 8800's prices should have dropped too.

wow my vidoe card is also good but my prosesor sucks my video card is a asus v7700 geforce2 gts

I should consider switching, I get creepy polygon bugs in Oblivion sometimes. After entering a cell I sometimes see huge flat sheets always pointing back to the player. It also moves correpsonding to a creature's position too, so that creeps me out.

Its teh hax!

Yea I'm thinking about picking up a new video card with Dx10 support as soon as I get a job which might be soon.

Your video card is not good.

for this old ass comp yes it is compared to my prososor