tried both video cards this last month, thanks to Best Buy's 30 day policy.
the 8800 ran fine and a third better than my ATI 850XT. i'm using an Asus P5AD2-E premium board with a P4 pentium at 3.4, and 4 gigs of PNY ddr2 memory. internal sound card and 3 Sata drives.
i ran a very graphic heavy route -- i'm not at home and i can't remember its name -- i think it's totally third party. with "carz" turned off, and one engine running, i got 11 FPS -- this with all sliders maxed out -- and the frames jiggled ( this is the only route that does this with this card ).
with the 9800 i had exactly the same specs, though the card loaded windows graphics slightly faster.
i'm using a PC&S 610 watts power supply, and i believe the 9800 stopped a drive write in surveyor and i had to run disk check on the drive to fix the tables and load trainz after that. so, i took the 9800 back today. back to running the ATI until fall, when i'll upgrade my board and chip and see what's what with video cards then.
mike
the 8800 ran fine and a third better than my ATI 850XT. i'm using an Asus P5AD2-E premium board with a P4 pentium at 3.4, and 4 gigs of PNY ddr2 memory. internal sound card and 3 Sata drives.
i ran a very graphic heavy route -- i'm not at home and i can't remember its name -- i think it's totally third party. with "carz" turned off, and one engine running, i got 11 FPS -- this with all sliders maxed out -- and the frames jiggled ( this is the only route that does this with this card ).
with the 9800 i had exactly the same specs, though the card loaded windows graphics slightly faster.
i'm using a PC&S 610 watts power supply, and i believe the 9800 stopped a drive write in surveyor and i had to run disk check on the drive to fix the tables and load trainz after that. so, i took the 9800 back today. back to running the ATI until fall, when i'll upgrade my board and chip and see what's what with video cards then.
mike