Nvidia: 8600,8800,9600. Your opinions please.

[darkrose0510]

My dear FX5200 has served well, but I think it's time I retired it, and as I have a new motherboard with more/better/faster RAM and a PCI-E slot, I figured I might as well make the most of things...

So it's come down to either an 8600, 8800, or 9600 GT, 512meg. There isn't really much difference in price between the 8600 and 9600, so if it was just between those 2 go for the 9600 just because it's a newer chipset.

But the 8800 is a little more expensive, but still (just) within budget, so I'm wondering why the big price jump? Is there something about the 8800 that should make me seriously consider it?

I'd just like some opinions before blowing hard saved money.

[bigtomrodney]

I have an 8600GT which is factory overclocked and it runs really great. Quake Wars on maximum graphics settings for 1280x1024 runs without a glitch. I know the 8800 is a big jump again in performance but I'm not sure about the difference between the 8600 and 9600 performance wise. If the prices are similar I would go for the 9600, I wouldn't bother with the 8800 unless you really are running games all of the time and have a big monitor. I find the 8600 to be a huge performance jump from the 6200 I had before.

[darkrose0510]

Thanks, I don't do much gaming, a bit of Assault Cube and Tremulous, but still want them to run well. I'm sorta leaning towards the 9600, won't be getting it till Friday though (building a friends computer then, so will get all the parts in one go) so I'll see what happens when I'm actually at the counter...

[darkrose0510]

Ooh, well that was fun...

The 9600 series isn't supported under the current Linux drivers; I found this out after locking the system up a couple of times trying to get 169.whatever to work. After a little hunting, I came across the beta for the 171.06 which does work.

So if anyone out there is thinking of getting a Nvidia 9600 card, you can find the drivers here:
ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/171.06/

And now I've got 2 monitors running, which looks cool; just gotta come up with a useful way of using them now.

[bigtomrodney]

That's cool, you got the 9600. What are the specs like, and how much did it end up costing you?

I read on Phoronix a day or two back about the 9600 possibly not being supported but I didn't know for sure.

ActionCube and Tremulous? Two of my favourites! Man we really need to get a forum clan or event going. That would be sweet.

[darkrose0510]

700Mhz, 512M DDR3... 'tis good, just shy of 100fps in Tremulous at 1280x1024, perfectly smooth. Got it for AU$215.

I'm pretty much hopeless at tremulous. If I play it enough I can be tolerably decent though.

I occasionally host an Assault Cube server when the main ones go down.

[bigtomrodney]

I'm not great at Tremulous myself but it's a lot of fun just being there

[Mel Thompson]

Well, I'm a Mac guy who got frustrated with how few cool distros there were for the old PPC models. So my kindly friend has lent me, for several months now, a great machine he built a while back. But I get Nvidia problems. Seems like a lot of the Slackware-based distros just don't dig Nvidia. But hey, most distros do work okay with it, and I guess the others will have to wait till I can fork over for a newer PC.