which graphic card serie Workstation or Gaming?

Giovanni Azua wrote:

I have had second thoughts about buying a previous
cheaper version of NVidia or ATI e.g. NVidia ASUS N6600GT
128MB, instead of upgrading to this one I would rather
stay with my current Fire V3100 4 pixel pipelines 128MB ...
if I want an upgrade I want an upgrade :-)

Well, the FireGL V3100 is basically a Radeon X300, and this chip is really
slow. The GF6600GT would be a really good upgrade...

BTW: don't get fooled by thoughts that only the latest and greatest cards
are worthy upgrades. It always has been the case that the top end cards are
the least that are worth their money. They are faster than midrange cards
but also much more important, and during their short life cycle usually
almost no games supports the features they offer...

Actually checking more in details the NVidia vs ATI I found
that ATI has more appealing numbers i.e.

"ATI Radeon X800 XT Platinum" clock rate 520Mhz
"ATI Radeon X850 XT Platinum" clock rate 540Mhz

vs

"NVidia 6800 Ultra" clock rate 400Mhz

Clock rate says nothing about performance. ATI Radeon and Nvidia Geforce6
are totally different GPUs which use different architecture, so a comparison
only regarding the clock rate is totally useless...

Which somehow contradicts with your judgement that NVidia
is usually faster than ATI ...

You can't says that Nvidia is faster than ATI since thats not true. You
can't says that ATI is faster than Nvidia since thats not true. But You will
find games in which one of them performs better than the other. Overall, the
performance between Nvidia and ATI is around the same level...

funnily I loaded my 3DMark
project for their latest benchmarking (I got 1180 score)
and reviewing others saw the topmost 12K score being NVidia
6800 Ultra, perhaps very few people have bought ATI latest
already ...

3DMark is a synthetic benchmark which says nothing about the real life
gaming performance...

When the comparison comes to drivers availability I think this
changes continuosly ... I think is better getting the
most powerful card and wait for the drivers to upgrade than
getting great drivers support but then stay with the desire
of having the fastest card :-)

What do you think?

I think that this is a bad idea. The best gfx card is simply nothing without
good drivers. Drivers are not just some pieces of software that You need to
operate the card, they also decide if Your system performs good or not, or
if You get a lot of display errors in games or not. A ultra-fast card with
crappy drivers is useless...

You wrote You want Linux. Then You definitely don't want ATI. Their Linux
drivers have been crap for years now, and You have to be very optimistic to
believe that they will change that before Your new ATI card gets outdated
;-)

I think You first should ask Yourself what You really want. If You need some
kind of penis-enlargement-substitute to show off with then You definitely
want the latest and greatest Geforce or Radeon that's on the market. But if
You just want a powerful card that plays current games more than good enough
(and certainly does this for the games that appear in the next 12-18 month),
that works with Linux, does all You need, and that doesn't put a big hole
in Your pocket the GF6600GT is the best choice...

It always has been a wise idea not to buy the current crop of
ultra-expensive high end gaming cards but go for the midrange, and use the
saved money to replace the card more often. In the end You have much more
gaming fun and You also save a lot of money...

Benjamin

Hi Benjamin,

Thanks again for your assistance ...

I had the NVidia GeForce 6600GT card yesterday in front
of me ... but what made me hesitate before buying it was
the fact that it only includes 128MB instead of 256MB.
I know that more is not necessarily better but I wonder
if the lack of 128MB would impact my experience gaming?
at the end I can not know how much of this RAM is being
actually used? by e.g. Counter-Strike, Half Life 2 ...

I have also searched all over internet and did not find
any GeForce 6600 featuring 256MB ...

Price-wise the difference is very heavy specially here in
Switzerland:

NVidia GeForce 6600GT : 300CHF
Nvidia GeForce 6800 xxx: +700CHF

meaning +350USD difference ...

Any ideas?

I would also like to know if you have any brand opinion
I would say ASUS is the best one ... isn't it?

Best Regards,
Giovanni

"Giovanni Azua" wrote in message
...
Hi Benjamin,

Thanks again for your assistance ...

I had the NVidia GeForce 6600GT card yesterday in front
of me ... but what made me hesitate before buying it was
the fact that it only includes 128MB instead of 256MB.
I know that more is not necessarily better but I wonder
if the lack of 128MB would impact my experience gaming?
at the end I can not know how much of this RAM is being
actually used? by e.g. Counter-Strike, Half Life 2 ...

I have also searched all over internet and did not find
any GeForce 6600 featuring 256MB ...

Price-wise the difference is very heavy specially here in
Switzerland:

NVidia GeForce 6600GT : 300CHF
Nvidia GeForce 6800 xxx: +700CHF

meaning +350USD difference ...

Any ideas?

I would also like to know if you have any brand opinion
I would say ASUS is the best one ... isn't it?

Best Regards,
Giovanni

In the current games out there (HL2, D3, etc) 128MB of Ram on the video card
will prevent you from using the high quality textures. They simply take up
too much room to fit comfortably in 128MB. Benchmarks on
www.tomshardware.com have shown this. As they increased resolution and/or
texture quality the performance of the 128MB 6600GT fell of noticably. That
said, if you're happy with using medium-quality textures, the card will
perform completely fine.

Hi Luc,

"Luc Monod" wrote in message:
Then again, you can always add more RAM in your DELL, up to 4GB...
I'm not sure how a PCI-Express graphic adapter accesses this memory
though,
I'm so used to AGP Aperture.

I have 2GB RAM in my Precision 670 but no idea if the Graphic card
would ever use the RAM on board? btw I have found that XP 32-bits
doesn't "see" more than 3GB ... you would need XP 64-bits, I read
that in some DELL forum ...

Regards,
Giovanni

"Giovanni Azua" wrote in message
...

I had the NVidia GeForce 6600GT card yesterday in front
of me ... but what made me hesitate before buying it was
the fact that it only includes 128MB instead of 256MB.
I know that more is not necessarily better but I wonder
if the lack of 128MB would impact my experience gaming?
at the end I can not know how much of this RAM is being
actually used? by e.g. Counter-Strike, Half Life 2 ...

I have also searched all over internet and did not find
any GeForce 6600 featuring 256MB ...

Best Regards,
Giovanni

Then again, you can always add more RAM in your DELL, up to 4GB...
I'm not sure how a PCI-Express graphic adapter accesses this memory though,
I'm so used to AGP Aperture.


--
Luc Monod
Engineering Coordinator
(Dell Precision 470, 1 CPU, FireGL V3100, 2GB RAM)

Giovanni Azua wrote:

I had the NVidia GeForce 6600GT card yesterday in front
of me ... but what made me hesitate before buying it was
the fact that it only includes 128MB instead of 256MB.

Yes, that's right. Only some (much slower) GF6600s (non-GT) offer 256MB...

I know that more is not necessarily better but I wonder
if the lack of 128MB would impact my experience gaming?
at the end I can not know how much of this RAM is being
actually used? by e.g. Counter-Strike, Half Life 2 ...

Well, with 128MB the high-res textures of some games don't fit in the cards
memory. This leads to texture swapping which was a huge performance hog on
AGP systems. With PCIe, texture swapping isn't that much of a problem like
it was with AGP...

I have also searched all over internet and did not find
any GeForce 6600 featuring 256MB ...

Simply because there aren't any...

Price-wise the difference is very heavy specially here in
Switzerland:

NVidia GeForce 6600GT : 300CHF
Nvidia GeForce 6800 xxx: +700CHF

meaning +350USD difference ...

Any ideas?

I would also like to know if you have any brand opinion
I would say ASUS is the best one ... isn't it?

I have a MSI NX6600GT and a PNY Verto 6600GT here. The MSI is crap, the
heatsink is cheap and doesn't cover GPU and memory correctly. The PNY card
is fine, and it offers a very good picture quality (important of You use a
crt!)...

Benjamin