MSI 6600GT VIVO?? Any good?

[Rin]

I currently have a 9700pro, and although I love the card and it has been great for the past year it is simply time to upgrade.

I have found an MSI 6600GT+VIVO (AGP 4x/8x) at a local store for just under $200.. I know I can get this online with rebates for about $160, but this is just down the road and I don't like waiting =)

I have to go AGP because I am not ready to upgrade to PCI-E yet - I only just recently built this machine and it works just fine so no need for that.

Anyway, is this a good card for BF2? Does anyone have this card (or just a 6600GT) and how does it run in general?

Thanks,

Rin

[drew_952]

I have an evga 6600GT and I loves it. Perfect price/performance ratio, imo.

[Steel_Penguin]

DON'T GET MSI! The performance of the MSI card is a good deal lower than other 6600gt's.Get the Leadtek 6600gt at best. If not that BFG or EVGA will never dissapoint

[Spyder]

MSI has always been a value-minded company with all of their products. That means Lower Performance for Lower Cost. When you're looking at ugprading to something less than top of the line, when the prices of the better cards have been reduced, I would generally stay away from MSI just because you can get better for the same price at that point.

BFG is a great company for Geforce based cards (their return policy is the best I've seen among electronics companies ever. You can actually break them via OC and they will replace) But they do tend to still be slightly more expensive than average.

Don't know anything about eVga or xfx, which are two relatively new card companies, but I do know you should stay away from PNY.

[CingularDuality]

Originally Posted by Steel_Penguin

DON'T GET MSI! The performance of the MSI card is a good deal lower than other 6600gt's.Get the Leadtek 6600gt at best. If not that BFG or EVGA will never dissapoint

A reference card is a reference card... Any brand is going to perform roughly the same, quality of the parts is going to be the main difference.

MSI is a good company with a good reputation. Leadtek to a lesser degree. BFG seems to be getting a good rep in it's infancy. My EVGA 6800GT failed after only a few weeks with no overclocking.

[warcriminal2]

I am running a BG 6800 GT OC on my AMD64 system. Although it was a bit more $$$ It was definately worth it. After upgrading from the 6200 I was able to increase 3 of my video settings to HIGH while maintaining frame rates around 90 FPS on the TG servers.

[Steel_Penguin]

Originally Posted by CingularDuality

A reference card is a reference card... Any brand is going to perform roughly the same, quality of the parts is going to be the main difference.

MSI is a good company with a good reputation. Leadtek to a lesser degree. BFG seems to be getting a good rep in it's infancy. My EVGA 6800GT failed after only a few weeks with no overclocking.

Really? I've had an EVGA 6800gt for months (no OC'ing yet though) and haven't had a single problem with it. Maybe you just got a bad card or something.

[CingularDuality]

Originally Posted by Steel_Penguin

Really? I've had an EVGA 6800gt for months (no OC'ing yet though) and haven't had a single problem with it. Maybe you just got a bad card or something.

Well, yeah, but that's my point. If the cards are all reference cards (they perform the same), why risk purchasing from a company that uses cheap materials to manufacture them? Someone told me eVGA was a good company right before I jumped on their low price at newegg... I'm gonna send it back to eVGA and will hopefully have two 6800GTs in a few weeks. Dunno what I'm going to do with them. Too bad I didn't upgrade so that I could go the SLI route!