7900gs or 8600gt help me pick my video card

[onesojourner]

I am trying to get all my parts picked out for my winter computer build early so I can watch the prices and get the best deal. I need the best bang for the buck here. I want to spend less than $130 (with shipping) one of my friends is also building a computer and he went with the 8600gt, He is a windows user though. I know that linux support for the 8 series is not great right now but we will be on 7.10 by the time I build this. how does the 8600gt stack up against the 7900gs for ubuntu gaming? I am not sure if I will run my games through wine or just boot into xp at this point. looking at toms hardware it looks like the 8600gt performs great on some games and the 7900gs is better on other. any thoughts?

[Cappy]

They are about the same, 8600 is just a little better than the 7900GS. I know because I bought the 7900GS just a week before the 8600 came out. I thought about returning it but the speed difference wasn't enough to justify the cost of returning it.

8600GS definitely. The only bad thing is you have to run the Envy program (which is a piece of cake) instead of using the built-in ubuntu video drivers (nvidia-glx/nvidia-glx-new). The only actual downside is that you have to rerun envy whenever you upgrade your kernel.

8600 supports DX10 and that will effect what kind of effects can occur in Linux too.

I'm kind of hoping the next generation of Nvidia cards will come out sometime before the end of the year. I'm sure not going to plop down $500 on a year old video card 8800GTX.

[onesojourner]

did you mean 8600gt or gts?

[Sockerdrickan]

Get anything in the 8***