Age of Conan

[homrok]

I bought the 9800 XFX one with 512 meg, 380 bucks inclusive tax
also picked up vista upgradable version, 110 inclusive tax

so a total of 490 dollars, a little over my budget but... shit happens

[ShyguyXPC]

The tigerdirect deal (eVGA 9800GTX 512MB) was $270, & the full Version of Vista Premium 64-bit OEM was $90 on newegg... together not including shipping, the 2 of them would of cost less than the card you bought...

as to finding the speed of your RAM, reboot your system, it should say what speed it is on the boot up screen, otherwise download PC Wizard ( http://www.cpuid.com/pcwizard.php ) install it, run it, & should be able to tell you just about anything as far as the tech specs of your system, CPU, RAM, Mobo, GPU, storage, DirectX, etc etc

[homrok]

My wife is a control freak, she would not alow me to use the card for anything that well I know her, so everything have to be purchased with cash mainly If i needed to upgrade something than I'd end up with a 6300 card or something and windows 3.11 if it was up to her.

Is the XFX card a good card though? as long as it is a good card for gaming than im happy about it,

I also heard that XP is realeasing some service pack upgrade that will make XP able to use DX10 is that correct?

[ShyguyXPC]

XFX is a good brand, eVGA's Rival actually...

as to XP, they Just released Service Pack 3 for XP a week or two ago, but there was no DX10 in it. as far as I know, M$ has no plans or intentions to release DX10 for XP. would be kind of hard to do it anyways, since DX10 has some features that do away with some of the DX9 components etc etc...

[homrok]

Originally Posted by ShyguyXPC

XFX is a good brand, eVGA's Rival actually...

as to XP, they Just released Service Pack 3 for XP a week or two ago, but there was no DX10 in it. as far as I know, M$ has no plans or intentions to release DX10 for XP. would be kind of hard to do it anyways, since DX10 has some features that do away with some of the DX9 components etc etc...

Good Deal, the whole name of the product i bought is "Geforce 9800 GTX"
personaly i have no idea what the GTX stands for but I assume it stands for "this product is better than the other companys product" cause it say GT on almost all items,

[ShyguyXPC]

no, GT & GTX are the different models of the nVidia cards, that we've been discussing in this thread... some have suggested the 9600GT, which is a newer model, of the 9xxx series, but is a upper mid level card. others have suggested the 8800GT, a revised version of the 8800 series. in the 8800 series there is the 8800GTS 320MB & 640MB, & 768MB 8800GTX & 8800 Ultra based on the G80 core (also listed them in order of performance from low to high), then came the G92 cores, revised & improved upon G80 cores, in this 8800 series there is the 8800GS 384MB, 8800GT 256MB, 512MB & 1GB, 8800GTS 512MB & 1GB (also in order of performance). Now there is the Geforce 9800 series that replaces the 8800's, although they use the same G92 core, currently there's only the 9800GTX & 9800 GX2... the 9800GTX replaces the 8800GTX & Ultra's, though spec wise is practically the same as the current G92 8800GTS, it adds 2 SLI connectors like the 8800GTX/Ultra has, so you could run a Tri SLI setup with them, which wasn't possible with the 8800GTS.

But you could easily find out more about the cards by going to Wikipedia & using search terms like "Geforce 8 series" & "Geforce 9 Series".

[homrok]

Thank you a lot, I was not sure what the difference between GT and GTX was but now I see that its nothing more than just model number.

[johnross2007]

Are you saying there is minimal performance gain with the 9800GTX over the 8800GTS G92? If so that sucks.

[ShyguyXPC]

Yes, they are more or less the same exact card, use the same G92 chip, & have the same amount or Stream Processors, about the only difference is the clock speeds of the Core, Shaders & Memory, resulting in slightly more bandwidth & Texture fill rates...

8800GTS 512MB:
Number of Stream Processors: 128
Core Clock: 650 MHz
Shaders Clock: 1625 MHz
Memory Clock: 1000 MHz
Memory Interface: 256-bit
Memory Bandwidth: 64 GB/sec
Texture Fillrate: 41.6 Billion/sec


9800GTX 512MB:
Number of Stream Processors: 128
Core Clock: 675 MHz
Shaders Clock: 1688 MHz
Memory Clock: 1100 MHz
Memory Interface: 256-bit
Memory Bandwidth: 70.4 GB/sec
Texture Fillrate: 43.2 Billion/sec

Other than the extra SLI connector on it & slightly different clock speeds, their for all intents & purposes the same exact card, just marketed under 2 different models...

also thats the only reason I suggested that one 9800GTX on Tiger, since it was pretty much in the price range of the "older" 8800GTS 512MB cards, otherwise, one of them could be found for that $270 on down to as low as $200 (have seen a couple of clearance/refurb/openbox deals around & one or two sites for them as low as that, but they didn't last long LOL)

Oh & forgot, I think, can't remember for sure, but I think the 9800GTX uses better Memory chips, if memory serves me right I seem to remember reading that the 8800GTS G92 models were already pretty much peaked out at their best clock speeds, many people were lucky if they could get another 10-20MHz out of them (The 8800GT's were the good Overclockers when the new G92's came out)... but the 9800GTX when released was supposed to allow for higher clocks due to different memory used from the 8800GTS G92's...

[johnross2007]

Tigerdirect now has the 9800GX2 for $500!!!!

I know this is somewhat unrelated as he has already bought but what a deal.

That's interesting about the memory. I'll keep that in mind as I am currently helping a friend pick out components on a new PC.