Since you are not interested in gaming, there is little to separate these
two cards, except for features and price.  I assume that you are interested
in PCI-E cards, given the model number of the Gigabyte card.  Looking on
NewEgg, I noticed that Gigabyte also has a fanless X800 PCI-E card.

I think that the ATI cards offer some slight hardware support of video
playback with their cards; I forget what they call this feature off hand.
Nvidia has something similar, which they call Pure Video, but I think that
it is actually only working on a couple of their models.  Maybe one of those
is the 6800 (plain, not GT or Ultra) PCI-E card.

The Nvidia cards do not come with video in/video out, until you get up to
the 6800 Ultra model, while most of the ATI model can be found with one or
two versions that include this.  I suspect that you already have a video
capture card of some sort; so, this may not be of any real importance.  All
these cards have dual video outputs and TV-out.

Nvidia's SLI is supported by the Nforce4 SLI motherboard chipset.  These
motherboards come with two PCI-E 16x slots; so, two video cards can be run
at once.  There is an internal bridge connecting the two cards, which
increases their 3D rendering capabilities significantly (though not by twice
as much).  This is very reminiscent of 3DFX's SLI arrangement that allowed
two of their Voodoo2 cards to be run in tandem for increased 3D video
rendering power.

ATI is working on their own chipset which will support something similar,
which they call "CrossFire".

For someone interested in working with video or watching videos (DVDs, for
example), I probably would lean more towards the ATI cards, though with
today's powerful CPU's I'm not sure how much anyone could notice the
difference between whether they were using an Nvidia or an ATI card for
this.  It would be interesting to hear from other people who actually do a
fair amount of this with their computers to see what their experience has
been.

ATI has their ALL in Wonder line, which is well regarded.  These video cards
incorporate a TV-tuner, as well as Video In/Video Out capabilities, into
their video cards.  They come with a fair amount of supporting multimedia
software.  Someone interested in using their computer as a multimedia
machine probably would want to give these a look.

John Sproule

----- Original Message -----
From: "Peter Shkabara" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, July 26, 2005 12:43 AM
Subject: [PCBUILD] video cards


>I am back to making video choices. This time I am comparing the GeForce
> 6600GT to a Radeon X800. They seem to have very similar performance, but
> the
> GeForce card I am thinking of is a Gigabyte GV-NX66T128VP that has no
> fan -
> translate into QUIET!
>
> Is there a reason to favor the X800 over the 6600GT? I do no gaming - just
> general computer work and occasional video processing. So, I guess video
> capability is of some importance to me.
>
> Also, what is SLI support and is it important to me?

                         PCBUILD's List Owners:
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                       Drew Dunn<[log in to unmask]>