Should I Get a 6600GT or a normal 6800 ?

[millerhighlife_]

A 6600GT is roughly $230 while a normal 6800 is around $290. I can't afford the 6800GT b/c of it's $400 price tag. Which would be better, the 6600GT or normal 6800 ? I heard you can unlock all 16 pipelines on the 6800. Thanks in advance for your replys. Oh yea,
I'll be running a AMD64 3500+, 1 Gig XMS 3200, and a MSI K8N Noe2 Plat.

 

[alecjahn]

normal 6800... I'm about 95% sure, theres a fairly large increase in performance.
Oh, and the thing about pipelines...

Regular 6800s have 4 of the pipelines disabled because they werent stable with them on. It didnt work right so they disable any bad ones they can and mark it as a regular. You can easily enable the pipes, but you would probably have stability and other issues all the time, so its not really a great idea and is probably much much more trouble than its worth.

hope I helped!

 

[Apokalipse]

I would get the vanilla 6800, and yes you can unlock the extra pipes
http://www.techist.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=27489

 

[beedubaya]

Get the BFG gamer's edition 6800 and unlock the extra pipes.

 

[millerhighlife_]

Like posted above, will I get severe instability from unlocking the extra pipes ?

 

[Apokalipse]

no, the GPU is the same, only the BIOS is different; and with the plain 6800 it has DDR2 not DDR3, but that doesn't affect the core or the pipes

 

[millerhighlife_]

Yea, I just checked out the BFG version and it sounds great ! But, it's out of stock. Can you recommend any other company ? Will I have as good results from eVGA maybe ? I am ordering Monday, 12-27-04, so if it's not in stock I probably wont wait. I have waited to order this forever LOL. Thanks for the replys guys !

 

[millerhighlife_]

What's the "vanilla" 6800 ? )>.<(

 

[alecjahn]

I THINK, a vanilla is a non-GT, non-Ultra... is that right people?

I wouldn't get it just because it has the ability to unlock the pipes...

"It's roughly 60% that everything works fine, 20% that you only can unlock either the pipes or the vertex shader by themselves, and 20% that you've got nothing to unlock."

On most 6800s, what they do is build bulk cards, then the ones that do not test full, they knock off 4 of the pipelines, and if its just fine, they then sell it as a 6800nu. There are cards out there than can to 16 just fine, don't get me wrong. I just don't want you to make a purchase directly from the fact that you can softmod it, then get dissapointed.
If you can actually get the pipes unlocked, you may experience some artifacts, etc, while playing games

Anyways, you can always just overclock and get some mad results.



EDIT: Thought id make an analogy:
2500+XP : 3200+XP :: 6800nu : 6800 GT/U