Video Card recommendations: 8600gt vs. HD2600xt

[igknighted]

I am buying a new gfx card to replace my aging (and slowly dying) geforce 6600gt. I am running Vista and Linux on the machine, and want a dx10/opengl 3.0 capable card. I don't want to spend any more than $100. The two cards I am looking at are:

1) Nvidia Geforce 8600gt, 256mb gddr3, 540mhz/1400mhz clocks and 128bit mem interface. I am concerned about poor Nvidia driver support in Windows, and nvidia's linux drivers aren't great either.

2) ATI Radeon HD2600xt, 256mb gddr3, 128 bit interface (no mention of core or mem clocks, but I think core is 700mhz from reviews). Ati has much better vista drivers, and more promising linux drivers, but the linux drivers are as of yet very immature.

So, which card would you go with? Yes this is partially because I don't follow the exact specs of cards closely... but I am also very curious how the community feels about the new ATI.

[neodarksaver]

I bought a MSI HD2600XT DDR4 512mb, and i love it.

[cookieofdoom]

I'd probably get the 2600XT, from what I remember it was rated as being very fast for being such a cheap card. I'd wait as long I can until the ATI/AMD OSS drivers come out, though.

[Officer Dibble]

I've just paid for one of these on Ebay:

Ebay Item Number: 110180498709

Nvidia 8500GT SLI Super

Should hopefully arrive Wednesday all being well... just in time for my new motherboard. :popcorn:

[hessiess]

if you re using linux, then use nvidia, at least untill the ati drivers are propaly fixed

[lamadredelsapo]

I have the ATi and works like a charm, it happens to have a wee performance advantage over the nvidia if antialiasing is disabled, although it is not really noticeable. If you want to connect an HD Ready TV go for the Radeon as it haves the high definition audio chip embeded in the card so you wont have any problems or quality losses with HDMI interface

[cdinoz]

Can you confirm that the ati card works out of the box using the HDMI output for both Video and Audio ? Or is any other tweaking required?

[igknighted]

Can you confirm that the ati card works out of the box using the HDMI output for both Video and Audio ? Or is any other tweaking required?

You need to get the latest drivers direct from ATI's website. Read their install instructions, they are fairly straight forward. I THINK you can use Envy as well, but not positive.

P.S., my old card flat out died one day, and I couldn't wait for shipping one so I went to best buy (ick, I know) and picked up the 8600gt... I was surprised, it didn't really cost much more than newegg... go figure. Usually everything at best buy is at like a 50% markup.

[Dimitriid]

8600GT. While the Linux driver situation for both series ( hd2000 and the 8000 series ) is painful I gotta say nvidia has delivered more and amd/ati promised a lot with their recent driver and failed miserably to deliver a solid driver.

Until proven wrong by them, I still consider ATI to have worst Linux driver support.

[hanzomon4]

8600GT. While the Linux driver situation for both series ( hd2000 and the 8000 series ) is painful I gotta say nvidia has delivered more and amd/ati promised a lot with their recent driver and failed miserably to deliver a solid driver.

Until proven wrong by them, I still consider ATI to have worst Linux driver support.

Word

eh... How much did that card cost you?

[yatt]

Putting an ATI graphics card is the computer equivalent of castration. It leaves you with only half a computer.

[zugu]

Not even tomshardware can choose between the 2 video cards:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/12/03/best_graphics_card/page2.html