Opinions on new GPU

Just ordered this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814127519

(MSI N460GTX Twin Frozr II SOC GeForce GTX 460 (Fermi) 768MB 192-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card)

to replace the 9800GT that I've had for about 2 years now. I checked here, and while there was a lot of good advice, most of the cards mentioned were out of my price range (even this one was a bit pricey for me, been out of work for a little over a year and a half) so I checked out the TechReport website (love their podcast!) and they recommended this one for the econobox builder so I went with it.

The reason I'm asking for advice/opinions is that I can't find any actual comparisons between it and my 9800gt. I usually check out the GPU comparison charts at tomshardware.com but I couldn't find a chart that would give me a direct comparison.

I'm gonna have a WHOLE lot of time on my hands, can't play CoX until I get the new card, and newegg's good but I probably won't have the card in my hands until next week sometime, tues, maybe wednesday.

Just wanted to know where about this card might fit into the GPU food chain, how much better/faster/etc it would be than the old 9800gt, how it'll do with the Ultra Settings here, etc, etc, etc.

Thanks!

Well, a lot depends on the specs for the rest of your system (what CPU and how fast, how much RAM and how fast, etc).

I personally have a 1GB GTX 460 card by Gigabyte. 768MB might cripple it a little if you run at too high a resolution.

As for the GTX 460 and CoH, I run at 1280x1024 (still using a CRT here), with most of the Ultra Mode bells and whistles. I'm running Ambient Occlusion at a low-to-medium setting, have shadows at the second-highest setting, and only using 4x AA. But the game looks pretty good at 35-60fps outdoors (depending on where I am), spiking to 70s-80s on most indoor maps.

Hope this helps.

(P.S. - the GTX 460 can often be overclocked to even higher speeds than the videocard makers set them at. That MSI's 750MHz core/3600MHz memory could be pushed to 800MHz core/4000MHz memory, or maybe even higher. You wouldn't want to push it too far, obviously.)

The GTX 460 should perform substantially faster than your old 9800GT. The 9800GT is from mid-2008 and the GTX 460 is from mid-2010. The GTX 460's obviously not top of the line (and really wasn't when it launched) but it also supports DX11 and OpenGL 4.1 while the 9800GT supports DX10 and OpenGL 3.0. These aren't a huge difference for CoH since this game's not programmed all that well (i.e. your system might run Crysis with all settings maxed but still not run CoH all that well without some tweaking) and uses neither DX11 nor OpenGL 4.1 as far as I'm aware. The GTX 460 will use more power so you're going to want to make sure you've got an ample power supply, but honestly in terms of performance you should be happy.

I think the gtx460 is a good card for the money and handles CoH without issue

Generally speaking a stock clock GTX 460 768MB (running at 675MHz) is roughly 80% faster in general. Yours is running at 750MHz so it'll be a bit faster still.

You should also be aware it does draw about 50% more power than the 9800GT (160 Vs 105 watts).

Because it has three times the Streaming Processors of the 9800GT, running 20% faster, you should be able to significantly nudge up the UM settings.

And FYI, a review of a slower MSI GTX 460 768MB card running at 728MHz that does include the 9800GT on their chart.