GeForce 8800 GT SLI vs GTX 285, Core 2 Duo E8400 vs E8600
@gabrielnatanael (11)
Indonesia
May 17, 2009 7:12am CST
I'm about to upgrade my PC and I just hit this wall of confusion.
My current system spec's are:
Intel C2D E8400
4GB DDR2 800 RAM
ASUS P5N-D Mainboard
2 GeForce 8800 GT @ SLI
Win Vista Home Premium 32-Bit
And I will upgrade to:
Intel C2D E8600
EVGA GeForce GTX 285 FTW
(The rest is the same)
Does the upgrade worth the money?
How much will the peformance increase be?
1 response
@b0naf1de (111)
• United States
4 Jun 09
Yes, the newer 200 series cards are faster. I estimate that you'll see about a 20% performance increase at the same resolution, but as the resolution scales up the GTX 285 would run much faster. I don't however see why you're going to upgrade the processor. You could easily overclock that to speeds beyond what is on the market now, for free. The GTX 285 has 240 shaders, but each 8800GT has 112. The memory throughput is alot faster on that gtx 285 also, more so than even the gtx 295, if you look closely (512-bit bus vs 448-bit).
@gabrielnatanael (11)
• Indonesia
4 Jun 09
Well to be honest I don't have the cooling capacity to overclock my CPU since I have a very small case and only 580W of PSU. Upgrading my CPU with the E8600 with the newer stepping would also decrease my need of power and also won't go over the motherboard's reference max FSB (1333).
For the VGA could you give me the link/benchmark results comparing these 2 settings(GTX 285 and 8800GT's @ SLI). And I'm running a 17" LCD monitor and I play games at the resolution of 1280 x 1024.
Thx for your help.
@b0naf1de (111)
• United States
4 Jun 09
If you go to this site: http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/graphics-card,1.html you can select multiple video cards and then compare them against a common game/benchmark. Note that SLI does not scale 100% in most games and very rarely does it ever scale well. The only game i've personally played where sli scaled well was in call of duty 5 (about 90%), and since the GTX 285 has 240 shader processors vs the 8800gt 112x2 (224), the gtx 285 will be faster because not only does it have more shaders it's the total count is not in sli configuration. These cards require either dual 6-pin or a single 8-pin pci-e power adapter, so i hope you know about that as well. You'll either need a powersuply that has that type of connection or a an adapter cable to convert molex connector to such.
