Nvidia 8800 gtx

I bought the BFG version, and this is important because BFG carries a great lifetime warranty. It's a quiet running card, and it also runs pretty cool. What I don't like about it was the space taken up in a smaller case, but that was easily rectified using a larger case. The 8800GTX has no problem running great games, even today. I'd recommend it.

The G80 architecture made by nVidia has yet to go out of date. This card is so good, that it still holds up to it's competitors in the card category, even when cards are SLI'd. This card was so far above the competitors in its series that it was able to stand up against TWO of the lower step down, when they were in SLI bridge. Though this version on here only features 768MB of onboard memory, it's still a card that can buffer a lot and crunch pixels. I mean, the thing runs at 1.8GHz! That's almost as fast as processors at the time, and was faster than a lot.

While before, they were using things called pixel pipelines to render graphics, nVidia in this card has switched to what they call “stream processors”. Doing the math of these floating point processors, the six-sixty four bit memory controllers and factoring in the clock speed, amount of video memory and various other factors places the memory bandwidth, or how much data it can render and transfer to the screen at once at 86.4 gigabytes a second! This is more than 30 gb/s more than its fiercest competitor from the previous series, and shows just how dominant the 8800GTX is.

So, trying to find the use of this card isn't difficult. If you're a graphic designer on a budget, get this card. While the newest cards, or new enough have way more bandwidth, this card is a steal. It runs cool and quietly, and I even still own mine.