GTX480 and 470 are here along with a record breaking mobo :O

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Yea, I don't know what "rebranded" means so I'll just go ahead and say that you guys can delete this thread. Looks like nobody is interested.
 
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Because nobody answers within half a day, doesn't mean nobody is interested. You have to keep in mind, American's (which is most of the populace on these forums) live in a completely different time zone than we do.

And by rebranded, I mean that nVidia has been rebranding their GFX cards since the 9XXX series. Basically taking the EXACT same card, upping the clocks on it, and re-releasing it with a different name. There have been some dye changes, to make them more energy efficient, but they are basically still the same cards. No updates to DirectX whatsoever, for example. That's why ATI is slowly gaining the lead in the high end card business.
 
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I don't think we can say that these cards are basically the same card as the 9800GTX+. The GTS250 was indeed the same as the 9800GTX+ only more pumped up but from the GTX280 series it was pretty much rebuild. And from what I've heard in the GF100 videos, nVidia pretty much made everything from the ground up and that's probably one of the reasons why the GTX480 and 470 were delayed so much.
And I can tell you that these cards aren't energy efficient at all. The GTX480 uses up 360W of power. That's 40W more that the 5970 witch is a dualGPU :-/
Nvidia rely messed up this time... But at least the motherboard is cool :D
 
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More rebranded cards.... yay.

I think I'll wait for the 800's till I even bother looking at these cards. :p
 
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Well, I noticed at any rate that the 200 series cards took a relative pricing nosedive, but can anyone answer me something?

I have an 8800GT, and it's served me pretty well so far. But I know it's getting a bit long in the tooth, and while it was once the most powerful component of my old computer, in my machine with 8gb of DDR2, and e8400 dual core processor, it almost feels like it's the weaker link. Not so say it's failed me yet. I can play Crysis and Bioshock 2 without problems, though I'm afraid I credit that more to the RAM than the card.

But even given that, I hear mixed things everywhere. On Newegg, everyone's hot for the 9800gtx and the 250, but from what I hear, those cards aren't even reasonably superior enough to warrant the upgrade.

IS there an NVidia card under $300 that's worth upgrading from an 8800GT?

Although I also had the idea, since my 750 watt PSU is a beast in it's own right, whether I ought to consider keeping the 8800GT alongside the other new card for SLI. I don't know a lot about SLI, and until recently I thought cards in an SLI configuration had to be identical to each other, but if not, I figure it can't hurt to add onto my machine's graphics power instead of simply swapping it.
 
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GTX 4xx Cards are based on GF100, so no rebrand. Benches show they barely manage to beat the ATI cards (the 480 seems to be betweens a 5870 and a 5970 in most cases). Both the new nvidia cards are not full GF100s tho, because of yield problems (basically the same reason ati cards have been sold out for 6 months, low yields in the 40nm process).

They are powerhorses, however, their price, heat and power consumption are all higher than the flagship ati cards.
 
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A lot of the reviews seem to paint a picture that although in most cases performances seems to be the same/similar to 5870, min fps in a few tests seem to be higher than ATI's min fps. Obviously, min fps in this case can mean the difference between lag and not lagging. Fermi should rip ATI apart for GGPU work too like folding of Adobe CS4/CS5 with GPU acceleration (This is especially true in Adobe's case as CUDA support is heavily present in CS5 apparently). Fermi also has L1 and L2 cache and is designed with General Purpose work in mind (Though the more work you can keep on-die without resorting to vram should show game developers some benefits too).

So to sum it up, gaming performance in some titles are 10-15% Better than ATI, in other titles performance is a little lower or similar to ATI's cards and in tessellation heavy scenes it seems to perform better overall than ATI's cards, with the only downside being the TDP (250w vs 570's 188w TDP), cost, huge die size and heat/noise (96c in some test with heavy load). You'd expect this to change however in future driver revisions. Nvidia is also trying to push surround and 3d surround (same thing as ATI's infinity, except 3D surround has the addition of 3D obviously).

As for renaming, Fermi is a completely new archtecure.

@J-Dude

There's nothing in the NV camp now that is really worth upgrading in the under $300 segment, just older GTX 200 cards but thats about it. Second hand GTX 295 for around that price might be worth it though if you must have nvidia for reasons other than gaming alone. If it doesn't have to be nvidia, consider getting a Radeon HD5850.
 
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Thanks, but I refuse to go ATI. I like consistency for my machine. I always liked NVidia cards, but my old machine had an AMD-centric processor, and we all know AMD's prefer ATI, and Intel prefers NVidia, so I went for a fully Intel/NVidia system. That synergy is wasted as soon as I choose an old (and red) ATI card. Besides, I'm too used to the GeForce hierarchy than the ATI one. I know what an 8800GT is, but I couldn't tell you what an "HD5850" was. No thanks, so over Radeons...
 
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I think your post is hilarious j-dude.

Thanks, but I refuse to go ATI. I like consistency for my machine. I always liked NVidia cards, but my old machine had an AMD-centric processor, and we all know AMD's prefer ATI, and Intel prefers NVidia, so I went for a fully Intel/NVidia system.
I'm using an Intel/ATI system. Never had a single issue. What you are talking about is a common misconception. I've seen just as many issues with Intel/nVidia systems as Intel/ATi and all other combinations.

That synergy is wasted as soon as I choose an old (and red) ATI card. Besides, I'm too used to the GeForce hierarchy than the ATI one. I know what an 8800GT is, but I couldn't tell you what an "HD5850" was. No thanks, so over Radeons...
Ha. Video card naming schemes are designed to be confusing so that people looking to buy end up buying a Dell. You shouldn't pick nVidia just because you have a bias for them (that's what ads are meant to do: create a subconscious bias that you may not be able to explain). And before you accuse me of being an ATi fanboy, if nVidias GTX480 wasn't so expensive compared to a 5870, I would have bought two.
 
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I think your post is hilarious j-dude.



I'm using an Intel/ATI system. Never had a single issue. What you are talking about is a common misconception. I've seen just as many issues with Intel/nVidia systems as Intel/ATi and all other combinations.



Ha. Video card naming schemes are designed to be confusing so that people looking to buy end up buying a Dell. You shouldn't pick nVidia just because you have a bias for them (that's what ads are meant to do: create a subconscious bias that you may not be able to explain). And before you accuse me of being an ATi fanboy, if nVidias GTX480 wasn't so expensive compared to a 5870, I would have bought two.
Can't blame him though. I would rather stick with nVidia myself as well. Although the new 5870 seems really nice and 50 euro cheaper than the GTX 285M (I'm talking about laptop cards here, I work mostly on laptops nowadays), still, I know from experience that ATI cards [in laptops] tend to overheat faster (then again, this might be the cooling system in the laptop, rather than the card itself) and nVidia's support is far better. Many good Beta drivers are constantly being released, in addition to the DoX optimised drivers for laptops.
 
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Didn't Nvidia recently mess up their software so their chips overheated all over the world? I recall someone saying something about that.
 
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Yeah, they made a one-time driver, which they instantly recalled. Mistakes can happen to anyone.
 
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When ATI does it, it's habit. When Nvidia does it, it's an accident that's "fixed immediately", eh?
 
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When ATI does it, it's habit. When Nvidia does it, it's an accident that's "fixed immediately", eh?
Like...70% of all ATI's that are in laptops (pre 5XXX series, I haven't heard much about the new ones), are overheating. From what I've seen, most of ATI's cards tend to overheat. nVidia just made a mistake once, by releasing a crappy driver they shouldn't have released in the first place. They pulled the driver back in less than a day. ATI on the other hand, consistently releases drivers that do nothing against the many overheating issues they have. Your argument makes absolutely no sense here. nVidia made a one-time mistake, ATI does it constantly.
 
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Like...70% of all ATI's that are in laptops (pre 5XXX series, I haven't heard much about the new ones), are overheating. From what I've seen, most of ATI's cards tend to overheat. nVidia just made a mistake once, by releasing a crappy driver they shouldn't have released in the first place. They pulled the driver back in less than a day. ATI on the other hand, consistently releases drivers that do nothing against the many overheating issues they have. Your argument makes absolutely no sense here. nVidia made a one-time mistake, ATI does it constantly.
I've had 3 ATi cards, 2 desktop, 1 laptop. 0 issues so far. I've also had 2 nVidia cards. Also 0 issues.

Point is, one person starts spreading his analysis around. People who don't follow tech sites closely start repeating it and exaggerating it until it's blown out of proportion.
 
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I've had 3 ATi cards, 2 desktop, 1 laptop. 0 issues so far. I've also had 2 nVidia cards. Also 0 issues.

Point is, one person starts spreading his analysis around. People who don't follow tech sites closely start repeating it and exaggerating it until it's blown out of proportion.
I've had a couple of ATI's that overheated. I see people running around with ATI powered laptops on school, which blow out enooooorrrmously hot air. So I thought, let's run a temperature app on those laptops. ATI's: idling at 68 degrees Celsius. That's hot. Very hot.
 

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