E8400 vs. Q6600 and 8800GT vs. 9800GTX and 780i mobo vs. 790i Ultra SLI mobo

reignofchaos · 8th July 2008, 10:22

Flipsyde do not buy a G92 based card if you care for image quality. I recently had the opportunity to compare a G92 8800GT to a G80 8800 Ultra and the ATi HD4850 on the same machine. The ATi card was by far the best in image quality with the G80 just a shade behind when rendering shadows. Otherwise the 8800 Ultra was close. The G92 8800GT looked just terrible compared to both. I assume Nvidia is much more aggressive in its texture compression algorithms with the G92 as it has a narrower 256bit bus.

As of now, the best bang for the buck is the HD4850 and expect the hacked firegl drivers for it to appear pretty soon. Even without it, the ATi cards are much faster in viewport acceleration with lots of wireframe models and their GL drivers have improved dramatically of late. They had some poly selection issues in older drivers but I guess that should be fixed by now. The performance difference between the 4850 and the 8800 ultra was around 5% in favour of the ultra. However a little overclocking can fix that. The 8800GT is not even close in terms of image quality or performance. Getting an SLI pair of 8800GT is ridiculous... you'll get more frames but at downright pathetic quality levels. I'd grab a pair of 4850 cards and run them in CF if I were in the market for video cards and this is coming from someone running dual nvidia cards. Also the indian market price is not too bad - around 11.5-12 grand.

Coming to the chipset, don't get nforce chipsets unless you wish to suffer long and hard. I have a pair of 8800 ultras running on an Asus 680i motherboard in SLI and the experience has just been nightmarish. Cold boot issues, bios corruptions, poor overclocks with 45nm chips, stability problems, overheating problems.... you name it and the board has it. The 780i is the same chipset with a PCI-E 2.0 bridge so I don't expect it to be any better. 790i is a completely new chipset but even that has terrible data corruption issues. Strange that your friend hasn't faced them yet or maybe he never realized that those downloaded files are coming in corrupt because of a faulty SATA controller. Also it runs only DDR3 and good 1600MHz or higher DDR3 costs a bomb. There's no point buying it and putting it with value DDR3 running at 1066MHz or 1333MHz. Good DDR2 can do those speeds day in and day out at much lower latencies - eg: My Cellshock DDR2 runs 1066MHz at 4-4-4 latencies easily while ddr3 won't do any better than 6-6-6 latencies and to match ddr2 at those speeds and latencies, DDR3 must be atleast 1600MHz at 7-7-7 or faster. Moral of the story - avoid NV chipsets like plague unless you must have SLI and DDR3. Intel chipsets are much better and as Amey mentioned, P45 is the chipset to buy right now. The performance hit due to 8x/8x is next to nothing unless you have a 30" display with 2560x1600 resolution. At anything lower, you'd not notice the difference.

ImmortalZ · 8th July 2008, 20:19

The 680/780/790 series are once again the same chipset renamed. nV sure loves their rehashing. They have terrible problems with disk corruption.

ph03n!x · 9th July 2008, 01:33

The strength of their platform had been on of reasons for Intel's success and it is a part of their strength - I hope AMD gets it right with their 7xx lines too. I read somewhere that AMD has launched a branding exercise (similar to Intel Inside / Designed for Windows XP, etc) for the entire platform - have not heard much noise though.

reignofchaos · 9th July 2008, 03:41

Quote:

Originally Posted by ImmortalZ

The 680/780/790 series are once again the same chipset renamed. nV sure loves their rehashing. They have terrible problems with disk corruption.

790i is different from the rest and hence the data corruption problems. No such issues with the other two.

ImmortalZ · 9th July 2008, 09:21

Not really. The 790i is a slightly updated Northbridge with an updated Southbridge.

Its the same basic architecture.

ph03n!x · 9th July 2008, 09:38

Wasn't the data corruption a bug in their Phenom line? Or did I miss something on the platform? Can someone post a link please?

ImmortalZ · 9th July 2008, 11:10

AnandTech.

A later BIOS version is supposed to have solved some of these issues, but the corruption problem remains with certain motherboards with the 790i.

ph03n!x · 9th July 2008, 12:13

Quote:

Originally Posted by ImmortalZ

AnandTech.

A later BIOS version is supposed to have solved some of these issues, but the corruption problem remains with certain motherboards with the 790i.

Thanks much buddy! I do read AnandTech, but I guess i would have skipped this article because i am not interested in a nVidia platform - felt they are better off making video cards

reignofchaos · 9th July 2008, 12:56

Quote:

Originally Posted by ImmortalZ

Not really. The 790i is a slightly updated Northbridge with an updated Southbridge.

Its the same basic architecture.

The 790i has a brand new DDR3 memory controller and native PCI-E 2.0. Can't get any more different than that

.

Blue_V · 11th July 2008, 10:22

nVidia reporting losses, guess they didnt have competition from a long time.

DailyTech - NVIDIA Predicts Weaker Earnings Due to Defective GPUs, Warns of Lower Sales

flipsyde · 11th July 2008, 11:26

ok guys. that settles it. no nvidia. i'm going ATI HD 4850 all the way! i really hope those FireGL cracks come out pretty soon.

next now this motherboard thing. so can i take it its a no for the nvidia series of mobotherboards?? so P45 is the best board i can buy for its price?? please keep in mind i might go crossfire soon. also wanted to know if i can connect 2 22" monitors in crossfire mode?? i have one monitor being gifted to me by next month. thought i'd get another monitor and another ati hd 4850 card sometime in march next year. is that possible??

ddr3 is out of question right now for price/performance value. ddr2 is in. so please suggest me a board accordingly.

ImmortalZ · 11th July 2008, 18:49

Quote:

Originally Posted by reignofchaos

The 790i has a brand new DDR3 memory controller and native PCI-E 2.0. Can't get any more different than that

.

And yet the boards and the chipset has the same issues as its predecessors, sometimes more.

Coincidence? I think not.

Also, please be wary of buying any laptop or discrete card which contains the 8500/8600 series chips. nV has just advised that every chip manufactured is faulty due to a substrate design issue and will fail prematurely.

HP itself has nearly 26 series of laptops that are affected. This will be like the Sony battery fiasco.

reignofchaos · 11th July 2008, 19:46

Quote:

Originally Posted by flipsyde

ok guys. that settles it. no nvidia. i'm going ATI HD 4850 all the way! i really hope those FireGL cracks come out pretty soon.

next now this motherboard thing. so can i take it its a no for the nvidia series of mobotherboards?? so P45 is the best board i can buy for its price?? please keep in mind i might go crossfire soon. also wanted to know if i can connect 2 22" monitors in crossfire mode?? i have one monitor being gifted to me by next month. thought i'd get another monitor and another ati hd 4850 card sometime in march next year. is that possible??

ddr3 is out of question right now for price/performance value. ddr2 is in. so please suggest me a board accordingly.

Asus P5Q-E/P5Q-Deluxe... take your pick. Crossfire can accelerate only one display at a time. You can disable CF from the driver and use multiple displays. Same with SLI.

given2fly · 11th July 2008, 22:13

Why not a comparable Gigabyte MB. Or Abit for that matter?

Quote:

Originally Posted by reignofchaos

Asus P5Q-E/P5Q-Deluxe... take your pick. Crossfire can accelerate only one display at a time. You can disable CF from the driver and use multiple displays. Same with SLI.

ImmortalZ · 11th July 2008, 23:22

Quote:

Originally Posted by reignofchaos

Asus P5Q-E/P5Q-Deluxe... take your pick. Crossfire can accelerate only one display at a time. You can disable CF from the driver and use multiple displays. Same with SLI.

Wrong. CrossfireX enabled cards can do multiple displays while Crossfire is active. 38 series and above, translated.

Quote:

Originally Posted by given2fly

Why not a comparable Gigabyte MB. Or Abit for that matter?

Reviews on the web, really. ASUS has the best P45s on the market, as simple as that. ABIT IP45 Pro currently holds the highest FSB world record though - it just reached retail.

8th July 2008, 10:22	#46
reignofchaos Senior - BHPian Join Date: Apr 2007 Location: Bangalore Posts: 2,542 Thanked: 2,450 Times View My Garage	Flipsyde do not buy a G92 based card if you care for image quality. I recently had the opportunity to compare a G92 8800GT to a G80 8800 Ultra and the ATi HD4850 on the same machine. The ATi card was by far the best in image quality with the G80 just a shade behind when rendering shadows. Otherwise the 8800 Ultra was close. The G92 8800GT looked just terrible compared to both. I assume Nvidia is much more aggressive in its texture compression algorithms with the G92 as it has a narrower 256bit bus. As of now, the best bang for the buck is the HD4850 and expect the hacked firegl drivers for it to appear pretty soon. Even without it, the ATi cards are much faster in viewport acceleration with lots of wireframe models and their GL drivers have improved dramatically of late. They had some poly selection issues in older drivers but I guess that should be fixed by now. The performance difference between the 4850 and the 8800 ultra was around 5% in favour of the ultra. However a little overclocking can fix that. The 8800GT is not even close in terms of image quality or performance. Getting an SLI pair of 8800GT is ridiculous... you'll get more frames but at downright pathetic quality levels. I'd grab a pair of 4850 cards and run them in CF if I were in the market for video cards and this is coming from someone running dual nvidia cards. Also the indian market price is not too bad - around 11.5-12 grand. Coming to the chipset, don't get nforce chipsets unless you wish to suffer long and hard. I have a pair of 8800 ultras running on an Asus 680i motherboard in SLI and the experience has just been nightmarish. Cold boot issues, bios corruptions, poor overclocks with 45nm chips, stability problems, overheating problems.... you name it and the board has it. The 780i is the same chipset with a PCI-E 2.0 bridge so I don't expect it to be any better. 790i is a completely new chipset but even that has terrible data corruption issues. Strange that your friend hasn't faced them yet or maybe he never realized that those downloaded files are coming in corrupt because of a faulty SATA controller. Also it runs only DDR3 and good 1600MHz or higher DDR3 costs a bomb. There's no point buying it and putting it with value DDR3 running at 1066MHz or 1333MHz. Good DDR2 can do those speeds day in and day out at much lower latencies - eg: My Cellshock DDR2 runs 1066MHz at 4-4-4 latencies easily while ddr3 won't do any better than 6-6-6 latencies and to match ddr2 at those speeds and latencies, DDR3 must be atleast 1600MHz at 7-7-7 or faster. Moral of the story - avoid NV chipsets like plague unless you must have SLI and DDR3. Intel chipsets are much better and as Amey mentioned, P45 is the chipset to buy right now. The performance hit due to 8x/8x is next to nothing unless you have a 30" display with 2560x1600 resolution. At anything lower, you'd not notice the difference. Last edited by reignofchaos : 8th July 2008 at 10:28.
	() Thanks

8th July 2008, 20:19	#47
ImmortalZ Senior - BHPian Join Date: Jan 2008 Location: Trivandrum Posts: 2,179 Thanked: 488 Times View My Garage	The 680/780/790 series are once again the same chipset renamed. nV sure loves their rehashing. They have terrible problems with disk corruption.
	() Thanks

9th July 2008, 01:33	#48
ph03n!x Senior - BHPian Join Date: Jun 2008 Location: Coimbatore Posts: 2,566 Thanked: 5,963 Times	The strength of their platform had been on of reasons for Intel's success and it is a part of their strength - I hope AMD gets it right with their 7xx lines too. I read somewhere that AMD has launched a branding exercise (similar to Intel Inside / Designed for Windows XP, etc) for the entire platform - have not heard much noise though.
	() Thanks

9th July 2008, 09:21	#50
ImmortalZ Senior - BHPian Join Date: Jan 2008 Location: Trivandrum Posts: 2,179 Thanked: 488 Times View My Garage	Not really. The 790i is a slightly updated Northbridge with an updated Southbridge. Its the same basic architecture.
	() Thanks

9th July 2008, 09:38	#51
ph03n!x Senior - BHPian Join Date: Jun 2008 Location: Coimbatore Posts: 2,566 Thanked: 5,963 Times	Wasn't the data corruption a bug in their Phenom line? Or did I miss something on the platform? Can someone post a link please?
	() Thanks

9th July 2008, 11:10	#52
ImmortalZ Senior - BHPian Join Date: Jan 2008 Location: Trivandrum Posts: 2,179 Thanked: 488 Times View My Garage	AnandTech. A later BIOS version is supposed to have solved some of these issues, but the corruption problem remains with certain motherboards with the 790i.
	() Thanks

11th July 2008, 10:22	#55
Blue_V BHPian Join Date: Nov 2007 Location: Bangalore Posts: 173 Thanked: 67 Times	nVidia reporting losses, guess they didnt have competition from a long time. DailyTech - NVIDIA Predicts Weaker Earnings Due to Defective GPUs, Warns of Lower Sales
	() Thanks

11th July 2008, 11:26	#56
flipsyde BHPian Join Date: Nov 2006 Location: Chennai Posts: 644 Thanked: 84 Times	ok guys. that settles it. no nvidia. i'm going ATI HD 4850 all the way! i really hope those FireGL cracks come out pretty soon. next now this motherboard thing. so can i take it its a no for the nvidia series of mobotherboards?? so P45 is the best board i can buy for its price?? please keep in mind i might go crossfire soon. also wanted to know if i can connect 2 22" monitors in crossfire mode?? i have one monitor being gifted to me by next month. thought i'd get another monitor and another ati hd 4850 card sometime in march next year. is that possible?? ddr3 is out of question right now for price/performance value. ddr2 is in. so please suggest me a board accordingly.
	() Thanks