RMstudents Technology meets medical education

So my nVidia 8800GT finally arrived. Funny how it arrives on the day we have an informational financial aid meeting advising us not to spend our money on frivilous items. Anyway, why is this card so great?

Similar to how Intel and AMD go through die shrinks, nVidia is in the process of moving its line of cards to a new 65nm proces (down from 90nm). All the usual advantages are here: less heat, more speed, more features (stream processors), and of course, cheap! nVidia said these cards would sell for $250. There was just one problem: the cards were too good.

A relatively recent Anandtech article ("NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT: The Only Card That Matters") author Derek Wilson provides an insightful review on why this card will give you the best bang for your buck. The card is so good that it nearly matches performance with an 8800 GTX, a card priced well over $500 even today. So for less than half the money why wouldn't you buy an 8800GT right? So everyone wanted an 8800GT and retailers were aware of this so due to market demands the price of the card actually hovered around $280-290 (up from $250) ... that is if you could FIND the card.

Well one morning I'm on slickdeals.net and someone posts a great deal on Dell.com for an MSI 8800GT, pre-tax price of $208 or so. I bought one right away and got a confirmation e-mail. Now I bought the card back around Thanksgiving, and the ship date was Dec. 10. Dec. 10 rolled around and nothing, Dell sent an e-mail apologizing for the delay and promised a revised ship date of Dec 17. This was fine with me as I was gearing up for finals and didn't have time to use the card anyway. Then Dec 17 rolled around, still no card. Dell delayed it again, and this time with each delay they were required by law to ask me if this delay was OK with me and if I said "no" then I could back out of the order. Of course at a price like this who would back out? Anyway I sent them an e-mail reply telling them that I wanted to continue to wait, but even though they got this e-mail they still called my house to ask yes/no (a computer, not an actual person) and luckily although my sister didn't know what I ordered she just pushed '1' for 'yes i'd like to wait.' Next ship date was Dec 26... and of course they didn't make this one either. I sent another e-mail telling them I wanted to wait, but they called my house again... except at the time I was in Michigan and missed the call. Guess what? Dell canceled the order.

What's going on? Apparently Dell screwed up and took orders for cards it couldn't sell because MSI couldn't supply them (or at least, not the amount Dell needed to fill the orders). How do I know this? Because I wasn't the only one affected, in this now closed thread at HardForums.com you'll find that this was a big headache for a lot of people (you will have to jump to page 20 or so to start reading about how Dell starts canceling orders). I'm lucky in that my order wasn't canceled until Dec 26, others were canceled much earlier

So what are my options? I contact via chat Dell Customer Service and complain, the person on the other end offers me a $50 credit. Not good enough, I ignore it and continue complaining. He offers $75. Tells me that I can order anything else from Dell.com and after the item ships I can contact customer service again and give them a case number and they'll refund said money to me. I quickly check Dell.com and find that there is an 8800GT on the website (only 1 model) for $280, so I tell him if he can give me an $80 credit (I assumed for taxes) that I'd be fine with this arrangement because it would bring the price to about the original order I made from Dell, and he agreed so that was that. I tell him I want this new 8800GT card and he directed me to sales, which was closed at the time (this was very late at night).

So the next morning I contact Dell Sales and I tell them all about how I ordered my card but I conveniently left out the bit about calling customer service and arranging a refund. I tell them I want another 8800GT, and I point out the one I found on the website. It's for $280 and the guy is all ready to take my credit card information. I tell him I want a better deal for my troubles, he's not budging. He talks to his manager, they won't budge. Why? Because the card is a special superclocked edition, which carry higher premiums and whatnot. I'm sure Dell had a razor thin margin on it so they didn't want to lower the price, fair enough. But I still tell them I'm not happy and he finds a card which isn't yet listed on Dell's website, a PNY 8800GT ('XLR8') and I quickly look it up PNY's website and double check manuf. part # with him and verify it is a 512MB 8800GT, this card is also $280. I tell him that he needs to give me a better price so after talking to his manager he gets it down to $259.99 (so $260) but with tax this came out to $278. Sweet, couple this $20 price break w/ my expected $80 credit and I got this card for less than $200! Well finally the card shipped last week so I contact customer service and give them my case number, and in 2 days my credit is processed for.. $85! Why? Credit is $80 and they gave me another $5 for tax.

So $278 - $85 = $193. This card is really worth a lot more than that.

What else? How does this card perform? Well..

My current card is an nVidia 7600GT which runs Vista Aero very well. It also plays Half-Life 2 and Portal (demo) without breaking a sweat. Bioshock is fine at 1024x768 but anything higher and you can tell you're getting awfully close to 30fps. So I was curious how these cards would stack up against Oblivion settings maxed out. Now I don't own Oblivion but Tom's Hardware has a handy little menu system which let's you select the two cards you want to compare and see how they handle a game via frames per second.

http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics_2007.html?modelx=33&model1=1057&model2=716&chart=298
green cards: nVidia
red cards: ATI
blue cards: the two cards I picked, in this case a 7600gt (my current) vs. an 8800gt (my new)

Crazy right? My 7600GT is ancient in comparison. Of course this new 8800GT w/ my Vista OS, can support DX10 too.

Play around w/ the drop menu box and see how the card performs against the other games. Keep in mind how close the 8800GT performs to an 8800GTX, and remember that an 8800GTX retails for more than $500 whereas an 8800GT is $280 (pre-tax) if you can find it, and well I got mine for $193 tax included!

I won't have time to put it in until this weekend, because I also have to put inthe new power supply I got specifically for this card. I'll post any Bioshock improvements here.

Now the last thing I need is a quad-core CPU. I'm hoping that as more Wolfdale chips are release and high end gamers migrate to the new 45nm chips they'll drop their q6600 (G0 stepping please) for less than $200.