Best Video card on the market?

[crazysniper22]

i receive un-expected money from the college and i want to use it to buy a new vid card. At the moment i have radeon 9700 pro.

Im just wondring whats the best value for buck vid card on the market you can recommend.

Thanks in advance!

[KoolDrew]

It really depends on your current specs and what games do you actually play? There is no reasons spending $500 on a X800XT Pe if your not going to really use it. IMO a 6800GT is a great value as it can easily be overclocked to ultra speeds. So I would say the Leadtek 6800GT since it comes with 4 games and has the best stock cooler.

[Eaglee]

Depends on the rest of your system. If the cpu isn't atleast A64 3200+ or P4 3ghz theres no point in going for top of the line cards.

[Yawgm0th]

Id' also say a GeForce 6800GT would be a good choice. Either Leadtek or eVGA, depending on which games you like more and whether or not you want to overclock without using an aftermarket cooler. At the very least, get a regular GeForce 6800 (same brands). Nothing less will offer an improvement great enough to be worth the money.

But Eaglee does make a valid point. I'd say if you aren't on a socket 754 or 939 system or at least a high-end Pentium 4 (2.8C or better, I'd say), then you are probably more limited by your processor in most games.

Also, what games you play should have some choice in your decision. For the most part, I recommend the high-end nVidia cards over ATI, but the games you play may give ATI an advantage if ATI cards perform better. CPU limitation can also change based on that, too. If you're playing Doom 3, then it's pretty hard to put a CPU limitation on most systems that can even support AGP 4x or 8X cards. On the other hand, UT2004 seems to rely more on the processor than the video card. What games do you play?

[fr86]

best video card.. SLI 6800 ultras ofcourse! But no proc will run it at its full potnetial.

6800GT is the best for the big buck. 6600gt is the best for the budget buck.

[Yawgm0th]

I've yet to see any PCI-E 6800 Ultras in the retail sectors, and PCI-E 6800GT are almost as hard to find (in stock, anyway).

The Ultra isn't much more than an overclocked GT, anyway. Unless money isn't an issue, I'd take a GT with aftermarket cooling or just stock cooling over an Ultra, because the performance increase from getting the Ultra simply doesn't justify the cost.

[fr86]

thats why I said SLI ultras. Im not being realistic, but thats the best set up there is right now; even though the asus mobo and SLI ultras are painfully rare.

I agreed on the 6800gt for being the bang for the buck if you have a nice amount of money. I only need to run world of warcraft on max settings, and I think the 6600gt is more then up to the task; as my 9600xt can run everything on full (1280x1024) except medium AF and medium high draw distance. =D

[wayout44]

Yes the title of this thread does say, "Best Video card on the market?", not which is the best price/performance one.

[fr86]

ok, SLI 6800 ultra. They are the best, get them.

[Yawgm0th]

There aren't "SLI 6800 Ultras" as just about any two identical make/model PCI-E 6800 Ultras should work in SLI. But again, good luck finding one.