new card dilemma

Welp,

I'm gettin my new card this mumph :cool: , and I am in a quandry. I am leaning towards the ATI x800xt, as I am a fan of their cards since my 9700pro purchase. I see however that the GeForce 6800 Ultra beats the x800 card in almost every benchmark test and has PS 3.0 support. I don't, however. relish the thought of having to buy a 500 watt power supply to boot. Thats a major Pain in the arse to install. All that aside, I was wondering if any of you wunderkinds had any tech type thoughts on which card would best suited to my graphics hungry lifestyle?.

Well, first I'm interested to see a review where the 6800 beats the x800 overall?

Other than that, I don't recommend buying a graphics card this month at all - the new cards will take a while to drop to their proper prices. Nvidia have changed the power supply requirements to (I think) 350W - and that's only for the top-of-the-line card. Also, the retail product will not need two molex connectors any more. Personally I'm waiting until HL2 is actually out, so that I can see what is best for that game, and any graphics card you want will be cheaper then than it is now. I'm hoping to end up buying an Nvidia, because I don't like ATI :smile:

The 6800 is technically a better card - I don't know if you saw the leaked Nvidia report on the x800, but basically the x800 is not actually a new architecture, it's just a revision of their previous generation. Also, the reason ATI don't have PS3 support is because they didn't know how to implement it!

As far as what I've heard, the X800XT is the better card. The 6800 Ultra Extreme does beat the X800 in a few places but thats no big deal. As for PS3.0 support, games dont use that yet. Also, getting the 6800 card means a PSU upgrade as well, minimum 480Watt with 2 independant molex connections for the card itself. And so far they've been having driver problems. The X800 is flawless as far as I've read.

minimum 480Watt with 2 independant molex connections for the card itself.

This isn't true. Nvidia changed it after everyone complained. PS3 isn't supported by games yet because it only just came out - various games including HL2 will be having a PS3 patch to take advatage of the pixel shader speed improvements that PS3 allows. Anyone can see that games will inevitably use PS3, just like they end up using every other technology that comes out (shaders, bumb mapping, anti aliasing, anisotropic filtering, etc etc).

If your will be playing games like HL2 as i expect you will be, then choose the x800, as far as i am aware, the mem floatage point on nvidias cards, are a lot less than those of the radeon range.

In the end it dosent matter which card you get. Both the X800 and 6800 cards clean house compared to the 9800 and the 5900 cards.