Upgraded to G80

[Bigus Dickus]

Well the 9250 is just a revamped 8500 so...you're tied!

I had a Geforce2 Pro (box says Pro, card label says GTS, drivers think it's a TI...whatever) in another gaming machine I use here at work for a really long time. But BFG sent me a free 6800GT OC so that changed real fast

man, I could use a free card!

When my work computer came in with a GF FX 5200 I was pretty excited... until I learned just what the 5200 was! That was a few years ago... hopefully my work comp will be upgraded soon and I'll have something reasonable to use for casual gaming (the benefits of "work at home" consulting).

 

[Blazkowicz]

Well the 9250 is just a revamped 8500 so...you're tied!

actually it's a crippled 8500

 

[alexsok]

I have a Geforce 7900GTX. Logged in to Canada Computers today, 850$!!! No freakin way i'm buying it until at least half-a-dozen games use DX10 and Vista comes out

But congratz, there should be nothing right now that this beastie couldn't handle

 

[Deepak]

Both cards are installed (one in my computer the other in my brothers), time to benchmark!

You bought 2 cards. How much did they cost?

 

[PeterAce]

You bought 2 cards. How much did they cost?

Each card was £486.45 (high prices here in the UK). I only had to pay for mine, my bro paid for his

Would of tested SLI but I only have a 475w Enermax PSU and neither card came with an SLI bridge!

The only disapointing thing is that the TV-Out break-out connector has only Component connection.

The brake-out connector on the older BFG 7800 had also S-Video and Composite (which I need for TV-OUT).

So I've lost TV-OUT (my tv only supports composite or scart!).

 

[Thorburn]

Should have mine in a few days, can't wait

 

[mcsven]

Should have mine in a few days, can't wait

You going to plug it into that 286?

 

[Rys]

Thorburn and I nabbed cards last week together to save some pennies, and they arrived this morning!

It might seem a bit disingenous to buy one when I have the reference board, but being able to have one 100% of the time just in case the ref board goes walkies back to NVIDIA is hugely desirable, given the stuff it'll help me generate for the site.

Thankfully we didn't have to pay what PeterAce and his bro did, though (sorry guys!) :smile: Current UK pricing is absolutely laughable and there was no way I was dropping north of £400 on one. Haven't spent more than that since I bought a GeForce 2 Ultra, and it's my definite no-excuses personal limit for a consumer board, no matter how good it is

 

[Thorburn]

You going to plug it into that 286?

Alas my 286 lacks a PCI-E connector, meaning its even less use for the 8800GTX than it would be if it had one.
Fortunately I have a Core 2 Duo E6700, I mean its not a tiny in-order chip running at piffling clock speeds, but it'll have to do for now

 

[PeterAce]

After a few days testing the BFG 8800 GTX I feel this is a massive leap over other cards.

It much more like the forward jump R300 made!

Performance is fantastic - 1600x1200 4xAA 16xAF highest settings in games like Oblivion, F.E.A.R:EP and Tomb Raider Legends (next gen mode with everything switched on). Framerates are very smooth + fluid.

The texture shimmering problem due to underfiltering the correct mip-map level (which was terrible on the 7800) is completely fixed!

Fitting the card in my PC was no problem (I was a bit worried about the 28cm PCB length!).

Michael's (my bro) PC had to have a HDD swapped to another HDD bay as his ASRock motherboard has a slightly higher PCI-E slot.

The dual-slot cooler is improved because it vents all the hot air out of the PC case (where as the older 7800 GTX 512 dual-slot cooler vented half inside/half outside).

The card worked perfectly with my over two year old Enermax 475w (12v rail 1: 16A and 12v rail2 :15Amps).

The are only two down sides so far.

1) There are no offical graphics drivers available. The ones on the CD was about a month old - no point installing them! So I hunted down the unrealsed non-whql 97.02 which are really in a 'beta-ish state'.

The rumor is that hopefully next week offical drivers will be released.

2) The TV-out break-out cables supplied is only Component (my 7800 had Component + S-Video + Composite). I really need the Composite because of my old 28 Inch CRT Widescreen TV.

All-in-all it's a fantastic card.

 

[PeterAce]

Thankfully we didn't have to pay what PeterAce and his bro did, though (sorry guys!) :smile: Current UK pricing is absolutely laughable and there was no way I was dropping north of £400 on one. Haven't spent more than that since I bought a GeForce 2 Ultra, and it's my definite no-excuses personal limit for a consumer board, no matter how good it is

Grrrr wrt UK pricing! (maybe you could help us out next year )

To be fair it was £42.25 cheaper than what I paid last year for my BFG 7800 GTX 512MB (£528.70 <shock> <faints>).

Rys and Thorburn, I hope you enjoy your new cards!

 

[Rys]

Grrrr wrt UK pricing! (maybe you could help us out next year )

To be fair it was £42.25 cheaper than what I paid last year for my BFG 7800 GTX 512MB (£528.70 <shock> <faints>).

Rys and Thorburn, I hope you enjoy your new cards!

In the future I'll definitely try and secure some kind of B3D deal for those keen to pick up hardware on launch days or thereabouts. As it stands, 2 boards was the max I could get cheaply and I'd earmarked the 2nd for Throbber ages ago, so I didn't offer it around the place to anyone else. But yes, next time you're up for an expensive board purchase I hope I can help ease the pain a bit!

97.02 is official now I note (at least it's available on nvidia.com), and that's what I've been using so far, although 100.xx looks to be the driver series of choice for G80.

 

[L233]

although 100.xx looks to be the driver series of choice for G80.

Are beta drivers publicly available?

 

[Rys]

Not that I'm aware of, although they're not too far away.

 

[PeterAce]

2) The TV-out break-out cables supplied is only Component (my 7800 had Component + S-Video + Composite). I really need the Composite because of my old 28 Inch CRT Widescreen TV.

I had a big moan about this to my brother and after a lot of head scrtching and lots of double checking of specs (on the box, and PDFs on the BFG website) nothing about composite anywhere!

But then we had a eureka moment when we realised that the HDTV Component break-out cable had a little embossed (on the blue connector) '/comp' lable! Sure enough the middle port doubles up as a component cable, the drivers auto detected composite and TV-Out started working!

The only problem now is that videos are almost completely dark grey/black when clone mode TV-out is enabled.

So new drivers (with bug fixes) are needed.