Sorry – replace “nvTweak” with “RivaTuner”
I’m pretty sure the 6600 GT doesn’t actually physically have the pipes on the chip. While sometimes they’ll just software-disable pipelines in order to create different cards for different markets at different price points, often the hardware is different and the chips are less complex (having fewer pipes) to keep costs down.
Here’s another vote for 6600GT.
I play FarCry, Doom3, Civ4, all with very nice quality and performance. But if you’ve got the cash I’d recommend the 6800GT just for better performance and a bit of future-proofing.
New egg has the 7800 GT on sale for $275 if you want to try that. I just ordered one of thoe suckers for myself today. After some over clocking I expect that baby to play Elderscrolls: Oblivion with all the bells and whistles.
Correction: $250 with $15 instant savings + $20 mail in rebate. Definatley a good buy.
As I understand it, it is likely to be the same chip. I still contend that for much less money than the 6800, you can get the 6600, and get comparable performance (maybe better, if you overclock the 6600 and compare that to the stock 6800).
You are wrong. You may be thinking that because some previous nvidia lines, for instance, the 4200-4400-4600 were all the same chips at different clocks, but the 6800 GT has 16 pipes while the 6600 GT has 8 pipes, both with the same design otherwise. Essentially the 6800 GT has twice the horsepower - twice the output in every category. You can’t simply erase that deficit with tweaking - besides, you can overclock and tweak the 6800 GT too.
You can make a case that the 6600 GT is a better value, but it’s not in the same category as far as speed and power.
Now, practically speaking, in a game made 3 years ago, running at modest resolution, you’ll get so many FPS with each that you won’t be able to tell the difference. But turn up the resolution and/or turn on FSAA or anisotropic filtering, or compare current or next generation games, and the 6800 GT has a significant performance advantage.
By the way, if you look for comparisons on the web, you’ll see a lot of “6600 GT vs 6800” - be careful to notice that most of these are comparing the GT to the non-GT card.
look here for some benchmark comparisons between the two. You’ll notice that sometimes the 6600 GT is roughly the same as the 6800 GT - in these, generally, they’re low resolution and the CPU is the limiting factor in frame rate - that’s why you see all the cards bunched up very closely - whereas when the resolution gets higher and AA/AF gets turned on, video performance differences become much clearer.
By the way, in that search I uncovered the 6800 GS, which is something you should definitely look into. Apparently just came out recently… a different architecture from the 6800 GT but with very close performance, and cheaper, around $200. 6800 GS, if you’re interested in keeping your card for a while and playing next-generation games, seems like a much better value than the 6600 GT.
I mentioned that card in one of my above post, but further examinations show that the AGP 6800 GS (which the OP needs) is not quite as good of a deal as the PCI-E 6800 GS - the PCI-E versions have a core clock of 425mhz to 490mhz, while the AGP versions are clocked at 350mhz-400mhz. And cost more. However, while the PCI-E versions are built with a 12 pipe graphics chip, the AGP versions use the same 16 pipe chip as the 6800 GT with 4 pipes locked - if you are lucky, you can unlock those pipes with rivatuner and get a 16 pipe card.