Keep the 9800GTX rocking or time for a replacement?

[Carlos0068]

Well right now I am very happy with my 9800GTX. I have owned it since October of 08 and has ran every game I have played very well. Granted for most of its time it was just playing games on 1280x1024 (1920x1200 Currently). Even at my resolution it does very well on my standards which is pretty much med-high settings with 35+ frames with 4xaa on 1280x1024, and now med-high with no or 2xaa with 30+ frames. Which with the exception of Crysis it does very well.

Well the only thing I have against the card is with my recently new case (Lian LI PC-A05NB temperatures have gone up which has made me lower clocks from 815/2026/1215 to 750/1875/1175 otherwise during heavy gaming it will give me screen flickers which sometimes leads to games crashing with the ''Driver has stopped responding and has recovered''. As for temperatures it idles at around 41-44C with 100% fan speed (Don't mind it) and 45-48C @ 70% (Kept when just desktop browsing or watching TV) & Loads are 75-80C on 100% fan.

So you must be thinking, Well god damm why are asking to replace it if you are happy with it? Well for one a upgrade wouldn't cost much right now. Meaning if I decide to upgrade lets say to a 5770 ($180?) it will only be a $125 purchase due to me passing the card along to a friend for cheap. Or even the upcoming 5830 which I hear is gonna be around $239~.

So what do you guys think or would do? Would the upgrade to a 5770 be worth it? Never owned a ATI card and always been a Nvidia owner with no complaints (FX 5500>6800XT>7200GS>7600GS>8600GT>9800GTX) with any of the purchases. I know ATI is currently king of the hill with Fermi right around the corner. My 3 options are Wait for Nvidias mid range card, Purchase a 5770/5830 or Keep the 9800GTX and just buy a aftermarket cooler to keep it at its max clocks and wait it out until prices go down and Nvidia/ATI prices are right where they should be.


What do you guys think? :shrug:

[zanzabar]

i dont think that a 5770 would be worth it, it would be faster but not by much, if u could get something like a 5850 it would be a nice upgrade

and waiting for NV dose not seam like a good idea if u want an upgrade they wont have anything midrange (as in not top of line or that cut down from defects) till late fall at the earliest from the way that its looking.

off topic why did u go from a 6800xt to a 7200 and a 7600gs that wasnt an upgrade

[Carlos0068]

i dont think that a 5770 would be worth it, it would be faster but not by much, if u could get something like a 5850 it would be a nice upgrade

and waiting for NV dose not seam like a good idea if u want an upgrade they wont have anything midrange (as in not top of line or that cut down from defects) till late fall at the earliest from the way that its looking.

off topic why did u go from a 6800xt to a 7200 and a 7600gs that wasnt an upgrade

Yea the 5850 looks good, I will see how I do in the next few weeks money is really tight at the moment. Yea thats why I pretty much thought and meant with the waiting for their midrange cards by just putting a aftermarket cooler on the GTX to keep it at its higher clocks so it performs a bit better while the wait continues.

As for your question, the 6800xt was AGP so the 7200GS was the pcie 939 upgrade. It was a very good upgrade, Sold the old Intel P4 478 combo for a good price. The 7200/7600GS played the only game I played at the time very well (CoD & United Offensive Expansion).

[daseto]

why not just get a gts250 which is basically a 9800gtx+ and run it in SLI with your 9800gtx. As long as you can get them to run the same clock speed you should be golden. The 512mb gts250s can be had for around $125 and less at newegg. That would at least let you tide over till fermi comes out and in 6-9 months after that the prices will be at a spot where you could get a nice card that will be a nice upgrade at an affordable price.

[warthorn]

why not just get a gts250 which is basically a 9800gtx+ and run it in SLI with your 9800gtx. As long as you can get them to run the same clock speed you should be golden. The 512mb gts250s can be had for around $125 and less at newegg. That would at least let you tide over till fermi comes out and in 6-9 months after that the prices will be at a spot where you could get a nice card that will be a nice upgrade at an affordable price.
He has a P45 board which does not support SLI. Also his board only has 1 PCIe slot. It'd get costly to replace the board, single card is much better in his situation.

[zanzabar]

He has a P45 board which does not support SLI. Also his board only has 1 PCIe slot. It'd get costly to replace the board, single card is much better in his situation.

u can use sli on any board with 2 8x slots or better, there are fixed drivers like the ones for physX. sli on a 250 still isnt a good idea as u would have to flash the 9800gtx with a 250gts bios with moded voltages and clocks and it turns into mess for little gain. sli (and xfire) dont make things more playable they just boost the fps to make things that are just playable to nice or nice to great

[HuffPCair]

I have been thinking the samething. I am waiting on my taxes to come back before I make a decision, but I may end up getting a 5850 and a gigabyte p45, but I dont know yet. My 9800 is still doing good enough for me.

[570091D]

i'm still rocking my 9800gx2, waiting for gf100. but, if you're happy with the 9800gtx, why buy a new card?

[cowpuppy]

Don't do it.
I just picked up a 5770 for my step sons Pc and I get virtually the same results as with my 9800GTX+ the bonus is that it's DX11 whhoppdy dooo I should have gotten a GTX260

the bad is that by the time DX11 games are out it probably won't be fast enough anyways.
Now some other highlights The HD Sound driver won't install. I was running prime when my son said look at your screen it was messed up w/lines like a old tv screen. I found a hot fix for the screen turning to lines and being locked. (ATI just released it) I remember my x800xtpe doing this sometimes too.

My ATI X800XT-PE always had driver install issues and then I could only run certain drivers as I couldn't load NETFRAMEWORK on my pc as it had a boot legged copy of Windows XP

I wished Nvida would have had a cheap DX11 card out I would have bought that over the ATI. I never seam to have driver issues w/Nvida or at least there no troubles getting everything to work.