I was about to upgrade to an 8800GT and Core Duo 6850,but there have been so many complaints about the 8800 GT that I'm now dubious. At 84 I have no skills whatever in handling video card problems: I need reliability. I imagine that the 7950 GT has been going long enough for problems to be sorted? Hopefully it would give me enough performance improvement to be worthwhile? If so, what would be the best driver? Any advice would be much appreciated. AMD 4000+Geforce 6800 GT2 gig RAM

wow I guess I missed the problems with the 8800....I've nothing but good things...What have you heard? I have the same card as you and was thinking of upgrading too

First I have heard of problems with this card also, except for supply issues. Seems they can't make enough of them! BTW I'm running right now a flight on PMDG 744F at high scenery detail on XP and am getting frames in the 20's, which if you look at the posts over in the PMDG forums is pretty good! So I can assure you the E6850/8800GT Combo is a good one. For performance, I would recommend you stick with Windows XP though. Vista still lags behind, but it's not bad there either.

No problems that I know of, except supply. I have the EVGA superclock version, and it's working fine so far with beta 169.09 driver.

I haven't heard of too many problems with the 8800 cards either. The drivers for them are getting better all the time. I build systems for reliability and I wouldn't hesitate to get an 8800GT right now.You are 84 years old? That is great to see you here. :)RhettAMD 3700+ (@2585 mhz), eVGA 7800GT 256 (Guru3D 93.71), ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2gb Corsair XMS 3-3-3-8 (1T), WD 150 gig 10000rpm Raptor, WD 250gig 7200rpm SATA2, Seagate 120gb 5400 rpm external HD, CoolerMaster Praetorian

The 8800gt will beat any direct x 9 card, and the 8800gts series, if you can get a hold of one hten its a great card, in fact im selling one of mine so if your interested send me a pm.

Replaced my 7950GX2 with 8800GT and I couldn't be happier.Stan

I actually was able to get an 8800 GT SSC from evga directly for $299.99 and with the 169.09 drivers from evga's website, things have run quite well.By all means it's superior to the 7950 I had earlier in the year. In fact the 8800 runs MS Train Sim without a hitch where the 7950GT KO locked up many times.

Hey Icarus....stay away from the sun...:)84? You go, guy, and keep applying that wax as needed...:)I haven't heard of any issues with the 8800GT other than what everybody else said here....merely supply stream.Mitch

I know benchmarks are fiction but my E6850/ATI X1950XT scored 5435 on 3dMark06 and increased to 12350 with this card. Wowzer.Aquamarks jumped from 124000 to 166000Now - the real benchmark: FSX. With the program stacked with GEX FEX UTX etc I was averaging 13.5 fps over KLAX and the LA Basin (one of the harder areas in the country scenery-wise). I get 3-4 fps better now with more fluidity and less stuttering. It's a solid 17fps but it just seems better than that. Elsewhere I'm locked at 25fps with all sliders maxed except: autogen (V Dense) and 60cm TexRes per GEX's recommendations. Water 2.x low and no light/camera bloom. Ground shadows on. Plus UTX at night has been a bear, getting 1-2 fps less than at daytime. Again, the 8800 bested the ATI by a solid 3-4 plus better fluidity especially when panning.17fps is not movie-theatre quality but the sim is very playable.System is an E6850/P35 chipset2GB RAM WinXP AA/AF app controlled (trilinear/AA set in FSX)

Oh hey one more thing: we know FSX is CPU-bound and places less stress on the video card well here's some more proof:This card idles at 50C and under benchmark testing hit 80C. Running FSX the card barely broke a sweat and topped out at 61C so does that suggest the 8800GT is just loafing along? I'll bet.As for the heat issues, the fan stays at 29% until the card basically catches fire and this is a known issue. Evga is releasing a BIOS fix soon to address that, or you can use nTune/RivaTuner to boost fan speeds a little manually and the card runs quite well.