Oh the 7600gt is already on newegg for 189 bucks, guess you can't afford it. If I were you I'd save to get at least a 6800gs, cause I think I'd be sad if I bought a brand new pc and when installing a game like f.e.a.r. I got bad framerates and ugly graphics. The x1600pro is no good. If you can't save a little more to buy your video take a look at this x1600xt for only 135 bucks after rebate: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814102657 Free

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Fennerman, thanks for bringing up the 7600GT. i've just did a google search on it and found some useful information about this card. it beats the 6600gt. (and probably x1600pro/x800gt) guess i'll have to wait for it to be available in the local stall. (i'm in singapore) and hopefully it will priced around the 3 cards i've mentioned. thanks, guys!

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Um you guys are totally forgetting to take his system into account here. Why should he go for a 7800GT? Considering he said he will be building a "budget" system, he won't have dual Raptor drives or super high-performance RAM or an FX-60 processor or anything, so why would he need a top-of-the-line video card? His system would be the bottleneck even if he had a midrange video card. Don't waste your money buying a 7800GT or anything. In fact, cards like 6600GTs are dirt cheap if you look in the right places, and you can get pretty hefty benchmarks with two 6600GTs or 6800GSs. Hell, I just bought a 6600GT for 60 bucks and now I run SLI. I was stupid and bought a X1800XL thinking it would make my framerates skyrocket on my 3500+ Venice system. I was dead wrong, as my system was the bottleneck. So I sold it, got a second 6600GT and saw the EXACT same benchmark increase. Plus it was a hell of a lot quieter than the roaring fan on my X1800XL :-) If you're not going to get top of the line parts to support your really expensive video card, don't waste your money. The X800, X1600, or any 6 series GeForce cards are as high as you want to go. After that, you will probably see no performance gain at all.

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I just got the 6600GT on a cheap system and it is performing well. I play Fear, Doom3, NFSMW etc. and it's smooth as glass. Just make sure you have enough memory, get a SATA/150 HD and overclock a bit. You'll be amazed. By the way how do you tell if you can run dual video cards?

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sorry, guys. guess i should have list the motherboard and cpu i'm getting earlier on my posting. anyway, here it is : amd (939) 3200 DFI lanparty nf4 ultra infinity (1 pciE) 2 x 512mb cosair valueselect ram so, which card do you think will best fit for the new system? Nvidia 6600gt, 7600gt, ATI x800gt or x1600pro?

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Funny... I have an Athlon 64 3000, and even before I overclocked, I installed a 7800GT, replacing a 6600GT I reused for my Media Center box, and performance shot through the roof. Now I can play fear at virtually full tilt 1024x768, with Anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering, all the graphics options turned on. Same with Call of Duty 2. The 6600GT couldn't even run FEAR with AA or AF at an acceptable frame rate, not to mention other options I was able to turn on with the 7800GT. The 7600GT is a bit better than the 6800GS, and significantly better than thr 6600GT. It also beats the x1600. I'd go with the 7600GT out of those four choices. http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2717 Corn chips are no place for a mighty warrior!

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sold an x1800xl for two 6600gt in sli? lol. I replaced my x1800xl's fan for a zalman and now I can overclock it like mad (625/700 from 500/500) and I'm hitting 9310 3dmarks with an overclocked 3700+ san diego 2,750ghz. I run it at 610/680 just to be safe though, still hitting above 9000 marks. Also, running in sli is in my opinion useful with cards that are fast by themselves, since many games do not make real use of sli (some run even slower). I'd say if he has a 3200+ venice he will have no bottleneck even if he bought a 7800gt. Free

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He will have a bottleneck to a degree, but it's not severe. Corn chips are no place for a mighty warrior!

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After the comment above about selling an X1800XL for 2 6600GT's ill have to say that it looks like another one overstating the bottlenecking of a CPU on a GPU. I hate to tell you but you will see a noticable performace boost between an A64 3200+ / 3500+ with 2 6600GT's (or even an x800) and an A64 3200+ / 3500+ and a 7800GT / 1800XL. Wether people want to pay for that perormance boost is another story but in my oppinion i have never seen significant bottlenecking on anything higher then a P4 2.6GHz /Athlon 3000. I don't think any one on here believes that dual raptors and an FX-60 are necessary to justify a 7800GTX. I will agree however that a 7800 or anything expensive would be a waste on that machine simply becasue of the AGP limitation. Eventually you will want to move to PCI-E and then your card is useless. AMD Athlon64 3500+ 1024MB 512x2 Dual Channel Corsair TwinX Coolermaster Wavemaster 120GB Seagate SATA HDD Gecube X800XT Platinum Logitch 5.1 Surround LG 16x Dual Layer DVD Countle

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