GTX285 or GTX295

[Hecro]

So, im considering a hardware upgrade of my computer. I use the same computer for 5 boxing and it runs pretty smooth - 15fps on all slaves and 45-60 fps for the main character. My main character folder is executed from a Raid0 Sata2 setup and the 4 slaves are running from 2x Sata2 drives. My CPU seems to be fine - doesn't come over 60-75% on any of the cores and I have plenty for memory leftover.

I think my bottleneck is my graphiccard which is a 8800GTX with 768mb memory and I was wondering if I would get a huge improvement from buying a GTX285 or perhaps even GTX295?
GTX295 hasn't arrived in my contry yet - it will within a few weeks, but already the GTX285 is about 30% cheaper than the GTX295, which tempts me to go in the GTX285 direction. Would it be stupid not to go for the GTX295 and pay 30% more than just take the last generation for 30% less? I am sure that GTX285 will drop even more when the GTX295 arrives here in Denmark.

Hope you can give me a few hints about preformance with those 2 cards and if I would see a "big" improvement from the 8800GTX I have now.

[alcattle]

The G285 is newer than the G295, at least in the US. The G285 is also more powerful as it is based on the G280 chip. The G295 is based on the g260 chip.

[Hecro]

Erhm say what?

The GTX295 im looking at has the following GPU:
2x GPU - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295

The GTX285 im looking at has the following GPU:
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285

I can see that the 285 has a faster clock speed of 648Mhz than the 576MHz on the 295 - is that what you are refering to?
There is nothing stated about the 295 having a 260 chipset - not even the reseller page or the manufactorer. Could you please refer to a link? Thanks.


Edit:
Could perhaps also be interested in a ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 card - though I have been a nVidia person for quite a few years now.
The clock speed and RAMDAC speed on the ATI card is quite a lot higher than on the nVidia + its cheaper and it has 2048MB of memory.

Dunno tbh - need some advice on how to boost my systems preformance.

[Hecro]

The GTX295 seems to beat all current avalible cards on the marked:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/geforce-gtx-285,review-31501.html

[Noids99]

What he means is that the GTX295 is similar to 2 GTX260 cards SLIed on the same board but using the new 55nm process, thus the lower clock speeds and the 448bit memory. The GTX285 is just a 55nm version of the GTX280, so same hardware, but faster speeds (about 10%).

Upgrading to either of these cards will give you a significant graphics boost. Whether this will increase your fps significantly will depend a bit on your current settings though. What resolutions do you currently play your main and slaves at. Multiple monitors? What detail settings do you use? Do you find that increasing the detail settings decreases your fps significantly.

Otherwise I would probably pick the 285 over the 295 at this stage. It is the best performing single GPU option currently and if you find you need more power in the future, you can always buy a second one to SLI. Whilst you can still do this with the 295, SLI to quad SLI is generally not as great an upgrade as single GPU to SLI. If you are playing newer DX10 titles, then use them as the basis for making your GPU decision rather than WoW.

[Hecro]

Thanks for the great input Noids99.

I am running 2 monitors on the 8800GTX, where the 4 slaves are divided into 4 sections on the 21" monitor at 800x600 with details all the way to low. The main character is on the 22" with details set to low and set to 1680x1050. See the picture below for clarification.

http://img261.imageshack.us/img261/1189/multiboxingou1.th.jpg ('http://img261.imageshack.us/my.php?image=multiboxingou1.jpg')

I am indeed tempted to go with the 285 due to the 30% lower price than the 295 + it will prolly drop even lower when 295 officially hits the marked in DK.

I do play the newest games from time to time - enjoyed Bioshock f.ex. Else its mostly WOW and Eve-Online which takes my spare time.

[Moorea]

for wow I doubt your graphic card is your bottleneck. You don't say how much memory you have - You need to run vista 64 and at least 4gb of ram, probably if you go to 8gb you'll get the biggest improvement; that and symlinking your data folders.

[Hecro]

Its in my signature :) I have 8GB already :)

Well symlink shouldn't be nessesary when I have spread the WOW folders out on a Raid0 setup and 2 other discs or am I wrong?