by Nick N » Fri Aug 10, 2007 12:57 pm
When I made the statement "You get What You Pay For" I probably should have qualified that with "if you know what your looking at"
If you dont know what you are looking at, in the case where where your choice is a 8600 or a 8800, you get what you pay for is easier and your choice will be right if you pay for the 8800.
This is a situation where you may be trying to save a few dollars because we are talking about identical cards for the most part. In this case you need to ask yourself... "Do I know how to clock a video card myself"? and "Will I clock that card"?
The XFX cars is already clocked up 55MHz on the core and 130MHz (DDR3 260) on the memory. Therefore, without experience, you are paying for the factory to clock the card for you.
Will it go clock higher? That I can not tell you. That is for the user to find out.
Can you clock the EVGA card yourself to the same speed? Possibly, but again, that is for the user to find out. You may find out the EvGA card has different memory chips than the XFX and is able to clock much higher, or the opposite. That is where "if you know what you are looking at" comes in.
If you want to try clocking yourself and save a few bucks, researching the card(s) at the hardware sites to see what they are getting in the way of clocks is a good research project.
If you compared an 8800GTX to an 8800 Ultra.. that has a 200-300 dollar difference in price tag, thats a bit different, although if you dont know how to clock or how to quiet a fan system yourself, the Ultra will deliver higher performace, the increase in that perfomance over the GTX is not worth 300 dollars. You wont be getting 1.5x the performance going from the GTX to the Ultra making 300 dollars worth the purchase.
But
I have an 8800GTX clocked well past an 8800GTX Ultra in speed without using a water cooling device. Did I get what I paid for? Yes, because at the time when I bought the 8800GTX I paid about 580 dollars for it and the Ultra was 850+, and, the aftermarket passive heatsink which is silent and is 2X better than the factory one only added anther 55 dollars to that purchase, so for 635 dollars I am running faster than the Ultra and can clock just as high as that card, saving me 200-250 dollars. And have less noise.
If I did not know how to clock and I wanted the fastest speed.. the Ultra would have been the only way to get that. In that case i would have gotten what I paid for, even if in that case I paid a bit too much.
So if you do not know how to clock a video card, do not want to void the warantee or take the risk, and you want the fastest card you cvan get, then you get what you pay for with the XFX card.
Now, when you consider the performance boost going from the superclocked 8600GTS 256 @ 225.00 to the 8800GTS 640 at 369.00, you are getting more than 2X the card performance in the 8800GTS for less than 2X the price.
You get what you pay for by not skimping for cost in that case
Last edited by
Nick N on Fri Aug 10, 2007 11:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.
I looked at the 7900GT and the core and memory look slower. Is the memory interface more important than the others? (Memory Interface 256-bit)
