[crabnife]

I am building a new machine and I want it to be very upgradeable for the future and I want to to be pretty top notch for today.

So, two or one?

 

[1 g0t 0wn3d]

one high end card

 

[ebackhus]

One 8800-series card.

 

[beefers1]

which is better? a high end 8800 card or 2 lower-end 8500 or 8600 cards? i know that 2 8600's would still be half the price of an 8800, but performance-wise, how does it compare?

 

[1 g0t 0wn3d]

they will lose to one 8800 (any lower end card combination)

 

[koala]

I'm not sure how useful this will be, but it makes interesting reading. Go to http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php for a full list of features and to compare the performance of various graphics cards against each other. This site isn't ideal, but I can't find any other site to compare the performance of 1 card against 2 SLI/Crossfire cards. It works well for comparing single cards though.

Example: GeForce 8800GT vs GeForce 8600GT
http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php?card1=544&card2=513


EDIT: Click the Multi-GPU option under Advanced Options to compare a single card to dual cards.

2x 8600GT
Memory clock: 700 MHz
Memory bandwidth: 44.8 GB/sec
Shader operations: 75520 operations/sec
Pixel fill rate: 8640 MPixels/sec
Texture fill rate: 17280 MTexels/sec
Max power draw: 43W
Memory bus type: 64x2 (128 bit)
Texture units: 16

1x 8800GT
Memory clock: 900 MHz
Memory bandwidth: 57.6 GB/sec
Shader operations: 168000 operations/sec
Pixel fill rate: 9600 MPixels/sec
Texture fill rate: 33600 MTexels/sec
Max power draw: 105W
Memory bus type: 64x4 (256 bit)
Texture units: 64