Hard Decision

I am looking at 3 graphics cards, all in the same league, and am wondering which one to buy and would like some advice from people who have maybe owned one or more of the cards.

They are :

GF6600GT 128MB £90
GF6800XT 128MB £90
GF6800LE 128MB £75

All 3 cards are AGP 8x. The first one is the best of the 6600 range, and the latter 2 are low end variations of nvidias newer chipset (not newest). My problem is I've looked at lots of benchmarks and reviews of the cards and they all seem about the same level, with one or the other doing a certain thing better. The 6600GT is the most powerful unclocked, but does not do FSAA and AF as well as the 6800's, which also keep their head up in higher resolutions. I have also heard that both the XT and LE can have additional masked pixel pipelines and vertex shader units unlocked with Rivatuner to give similar performance to a vanilla 6800, but I'm not inclined to believe this. Has anyone an idea which is the best value for money or if the 6800's can indeed be unlocked to increase performance? In which case I would opt for the cheapest of the 3. Any advice appreciated.

I want the card to play at a smooth framerate games like Doom 3, Halflife 2, FEAR and Stalker.

My system specs are :
P4 2.0Ghz
786MB SD Ram
Asus Skt 478 Motherboard
160Gig IDE 133 HD
Onboard sound and LAN

 

i have the GF6600GT and its a excelleny mid-range gaming card. handles high res with no problems. overclocks nicely too....

 

Thanks for reply. What is your cpu and ram? Also, do you play games with AA + AF or do you turn them off for increased performance?
I originally planned to get the 6600GT as I've seen what it can do but then I saw 6800 GPU cards for the same price or cheaper, hence I've now hit a brick wall.

 

ive got a Athlon XP 3200+ with 1GB RAM. i dont use AA + AF.....

and still all games work fine.....