Quote Originally Posted by Jun aka Pekto View Post
That SP means it's overclocked and is around as fast as the GTX 280. I thought about getting a Sapphire Toxic HD 4870 (overclocked) which would also put it mostly within GTX 280 territory.

But...... 2 things why I have to stick with the ATI...... My pc components are mostly AMD*. I have noticed with my last (AMD) pc that the GF 8600GT was prone to several BSOD's in the past while my X800XL peformed superbly without a single crash/lockup in XP, Vista, and Win 7 RC.

Besides, I alternate between ATI and nVidia with every video card acquisition. Since my last one was an 8600GT....... It's ATI this time around. I've never broken the pattern (even if there's a performance and cost disadvantage). Superstitious? Yup. It sure is. Ha Ha!

Mach 64 (plus Matrox Millenium)---->Riva 128---->3dfx Voodoo---->3dfx Voodoo2 SLI. Post 3dfx.... TNT2---->Radeon---->GF4-Ti4200---->X800XL---->GF 8600GT----> HD4870?

Using stock, unoverclocked cards, an HD 4870 1gb is around $40 cheaper and slightly quicker than a GTX 260. Even an overclocked HD 4870 is still cheaper than an overclocked GTX 260 by $10-$30.


*Much like what I suspect with MS apps/games vs 3rd-party ones in different versions of Windows. The MS apps/games worked like a charm even without ever being patched.
Just to clarify. 216sp is notan overclocked GTX 260. The initial release of the GTX 260 had 192 shading processors (sp). However seeing that this placed it as an equal (performance wise) to the 512 MB HD 4870, which at that time was selling a little cheaper, nVidia decided to increase the amount of shading processors to 216 (which is still not equal to the GTX 280's 240) along with a die shrink from 65 nm to 55 nm (this also brought about a code name change from GT200 to GT200b).
So GTX 260 216sps are stock. There are overclocked versions of these which are usually sold as GTX 260 216sp OC. :D