8600GT with 256 DDR3 or 512 DDR2

Hi,

I was just wondering how much of a difference DDR3 made. Is an 8600GT with 256DDR3 better than a 8600GT with 512 DDR2?

I can't seem to find a definitive answer on the topic.

Charlie

 

GDDR3, as it's faster than GDDR2 and the extra 256MB don't make any difference.

 

I thought as much. So more memory is not very important?

What percentage difference would I see with an 8700?

 

Yes there is a difference
Yes it's a better card
Yes the definitive answer has been given on these boards, just search around a bit.

 

The GDDR3 will perform better. The difference will range from 10-15% percent based on game.

The GDDR2 512MB card is not capable of fully utilizing all 512MB of vRAM, this is why even though the GDDR3 has 256MB less vRAM it will still perform better.

An 8700 versus any of these cards will be at least 30% more powerful. I believe all 8700 cards come GDDR3.

 

And the fact that GDDR is a lot faster than GDDR2 contributes to this performance difference.

 

Thanks!!!!

That's what I wanted to know. There are a lot of threads that say that the difference is very small and not with the upgrade price.

 

Not worth the price, and can fairly easily overclock DDR2 beyond stock DDR3 speeds. Now getting 3DMark06 with 4150 score with DDR2 and 169.04 drivers in Windows XP 32-bit

 

SO how much would you say the upgrade is worth?

 

Working off my memory here and giving estimates, but....

You can get a decent gaming machine with a GDDR2 card (Sager 2090, Dell Vostros or Inspirons) for less than or just a little over $1000.

GDDR3 computer however, will cost you at least $1400.

 

Wrong!

I have both cards in my possesion The DDR2 card can not be clocked beyond the GDDR3 speeds, that is stock of 700mhz x2 the DDR2 card is only 400mhz.

I have seen people get as high as 575mhz (swoley and he is the highest) but thats not even close to the 700mhz of the GDDR3 card. Then take into mind the GDDR3 card can be overclock too!

I have had it stable at 850mhz on the memory with no problems.

My best score with DDR2 is 4200ish my best with the GDDR3 is over 4700 (would be over 5000 in XP but I do my testing in vista)


As for the vram... Well I have a good test for that I am going to do in the next few days.

Hellgate london recomends a 756mb card and uses up 98% of my ram with 2gb system ram, its a very very ram intensive game. I am going to test the two cards against each other and see if the GDDR3 card still wins even tho the ram is lower.

I think to the untrained eye you will see a higher fps count and thus think it performs better but to somebody like me who is experienced with the inner workings of how things work.... I will see more pagefiling and swaping of textures and things of that nature than with the 512mb card.

Wich in the end could be just as bad or worse than the performance of the faster card.

 

Currently at GentechPC the GDDR3 card for the Asus C90S is only 40$ higher than the DDR2 card.

However the C90 is the only machine I know of that currently has issues with the GDDR3 card and drivers. It only works correctly with the stock drivers, while the DDR2 card has worked perfectly with any drivers.

For that reason I think I prefer a 500/500 overclocked DDR2 card for about 4000points in 3dmark06 vs a 500/800 GDDR3 card for about 4700 points but possibly having issues with compatability of games with old drivers.

That and new drivers are increasing performance for games too, so there is bound to be a point where the DDR2 card will perform better just due to drivers.

That only applies to the C90 as far as I know tho, and I am doing my best to figure out why and how to fix it.

 

Good catch Vicious! I completely overlooked the C90s that actually come with both options.