Simviation Forums

Hi all
I'm looking at starting my pc upgrade in the next few weeks and I would like to know what make of PCI-e 6600gt card I should get.
There seem to be a lot of suppliers out there all selling the same product but are they all the same ?
Are the DDR memory models all up to spec or are there some brands that you should stay away from?

I play to build a fairly high spec machine with the following specs.

Asus A8v 32 SLI m/b
AMD 939- 3700+ San Diego (already got)
Cosair Low latency ram (plan to o/c cpu to FX spec)
2 x 6600gt video cards in SLI mode
2 x 10,000rpm Raptor drives in RAID o array (already running on my present system- these are fast-- takes 6 secs to load XP from pc turn on !)
Soundblaster Live card (existing)
Antec or equivalent power supply at 550 watts.

I hope to see a big improvement on speed over my current system -
Asus K8V-MX-m/b
AMD 754skt- 3400+cpu
2x Raptor drives in RAID 0
1 gb Hynix ram
1 x S/B live audio card

Any suggestions?

Thanks
chuck  

Well eVGA is by far the best nVidia card supplier, followed by BFG Tech, HOWEVER if I were you I would buy one 7800GT. Cheaper and faster than the two 6600GT's in SLi. If you really want to go the SLi route, I suggest looking at the 6800GTs. Their not that much more, and will do you much better than the 2x 6600GTs.

Also with those Raptors, make sure to keep them cool. My friend had his two catch fire because he didnt have enough air flowing over them.

Third what case do you plan to put this all in.

Cheers
Cameron

Well eVGA is by far the best nVidia card supplier

I know of a few people who'd disagree with that!

HOWEVER if I were you I would buy one 7800GT. Cheaper and faster than the two 6600GT's in SLi. If you really want to go the SLi route, I suggest looking at the 6800GTs. Their not that much more, and will do you much better than the 2x 6600GTs.

Indeed, go for a single 7800, which gives you future expansion options and, more performance than the SLI 6600's.

Thanks for the reply.
Wow I didn't know about those Raptor drives overheating and catching fire. I will have to re think my box layout. Thanks for the tip.

My intent on this thread was to find out what make of card I should get. What I meant by this was should I buy an Asus, Leadtek, Gigabyte, Xpertvision, etc are all cards equal!

However I guess what I'm hearing here is that SLI is not worth getting !

What I want to do is run three LCD screens in my pit and the only options I can see are using an SLI board to provide the addittion stand alone monitor outputs. I won't be running the m/b in sli mode with a single monitor rather as two stand alone graphic cards. One card will have the centre lcd on it and the other would have two lcd's on it. This is why I wanted to get the Asus A8N 32 sli board as this will give 1 x 16 pixel pipelines to each card rather than 8 with the standard board.
I assume I can do this with this hardware setup?Would this mean that I set the moniotrs up in span mode ?

The only other way I can get the three monitor setup is to go for a Matrox Parhelia card (I think they make a PCI-e version now).

This is the problem you have with CFS3 as the FSUPIC software will not work with it so you can't run a LAN setup with wide veiw.

I know of 4 Leadtek 6800 cards, one mine, and 3 that belong to my friends. All overclock well and have been perfectly reliable.

I'd happily buy another, lets put it like that.  ;)

Yea I agree go leadtech, I've seen some amazing things from those cards, and there low end locked cores usally unlock all the way up. I intend to get one of the 6800GS AGP cards from my moms computer and then unlock the quad to make it faster than a 6800 Ultra