[Beachy]

HI, I am looking for some help from people who are running geForce cards.

My current system is Pentium 4D with HT - 3.0ghz , 2gb ram, couple of sata drives and a geforce 6600gt 128mb video card. This system is 95% for IL2 only, only occasionally doubling as a BF2 server.
Anyhow, I have available to me several video cards and I wanted to get ideas, opinions, etc on how they perform.
The cards are all 256mb geforce, but they vary from a 7800gt, 7900gt, 7950gt and an 8600gt. This system is XP with SP3, with no big idea to change to Vista in the pipeline. My biggest question is, is the 8600 as good as the 7800 / 7900 / 7950 cards. Charts and graph's are not conclusive enough as there seems to be some differing items from the 7's to the 8's. So I figure, ask those who use the flight sim what they get and the settings etc. I know they are all better than the 6600gt though. Also is it better to have more video ram for IL2??

[HH_Cipher]

Ok, I have a Magazine here with the best 20 graphics cards available. I'll list a couple here to help you start off.

1. XFX 4870 512MB

[{HVY-E}Jinxx]

He's asking for the best from what he has available, not the best available now.

As to your question. Go with the 8600GT and then unlock the cards BIOS and turn it into an 8800GT. You can find the files needed to do the "Softmod" on guru3d.com as well as instructions.

It would be much better if you could find a card with 512mb of ram vs. 256mb as the game will run and load much quicker. So, YES, more video ram is better.
I currently run 2gb of video ram for my system and the game runs beautifully.

[Beachy]

Thanks for the replies. I do actually have both the ATI 4870 and 4850 cards in two other machines, but they are not for this flight sim.

I actually built this system out of bits and peices lying around from odd jobs I had done for people. I decided to make it dedicated or as near as possible to IL2. It is going to have a SimPit once I get the hardware and software to my liking.

As was pointed out, I am only looking at the cards that are available to me in the original post as they were almost at give away prices. I appreciate the information regarding these cards and hope that there are some others who may also have some input. Not discounting information already offered, but like good intel, make a decision with the best possible data.

Thanks guys,
Jeff

[stansdds]

I had a great time with Il2:1946 using a 7950GT, but mine was a 512MB card. The 8600 is probably a little faster and will perform better with newer drivers. Older cards don't seem to do as well with newer drivers.