What brand 8800GTS to buy?

[Cleo8]

So many choises and close to same price?
im helping a friend who want to but a 8800GTS.. he wants to use tiger direct but there is like 4 or more diffrent brands all withing a $20 range. some are "superclocked" some look better than others.. how do I know what one to recomend?

Thanks

[Rob]

The core specifications of the video cards should be the same, or they may exceed the minimum requirements set down by NVIDIA. But there can be differences, such as in their quality, how they are configured and how they are bundled.

I'm not aware of any brands that should be avoided. So quality may not be a deal killer with any brand, although I have my favorite brands just as anyone will with certain components - hard drives in particular. So that leaves configuration and bundle.

If a video card is clocked such that it performs better than the standard in the model line, then that's a bonus certainly. But for me, personally, it's more a factor how quiet the video card is. Different video cards of the same type can use different cooling techniques, so one may have a quieter fan than another, or the video card may be cooled using passive cooling which is quietest of all.

One video card of a given type may overlap the slot next to it due to its big, quiet fan used for cooling, while another video card of the same type does not block the use of the adjacent slot. This is not a factor in my choice of video cards, but others may feel differently.

And then there is the software bundle. A video card may come with no bundle at all, or it may come with a cutting edge game or other goody. This type of difference is no factor for me, but may be enticing to some.

Hope that helps!

[harotoast]

comparing the 8800 gts cards from BFG, Asus and XFX, the BFG card had better scores in core clock (580 vs. 560 xfx, 500 asus), shader clock (1350 vs 1200), memory clock (1700 vs 1600), texture fill rate (27.8 vs 24 billion fills), memory bandwidth (68 vs 64 gb/s), and was never beaten anywhere. the BFG's suffix is OC2, so it has the improvements already of being overclocked without voiding warranties or endangering the card. on top of that, it was 20 dollars cheaper with rebate from canadacomputers.com.