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| Which should I get? (Vid Card) [message #53357] |
Fri, 31 October 2003 01:58   |
abakshi
Messages: 50
Registered: June 2003
Karma: 0
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Recruit |
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Well - how much do you want to spend? And what will you use the card for?
Because for under $80, I'd say go for a Radeon 8500 (if necessary 8500LE, which was a slightly slower 8500, now also sold as 9100). Prior to ATi's R300 line (9700 Pro), the 8500 was the company's top dog. It's still pretty decent - definitely more than fine for Renegade, and yes, it'll play Halo pretty well.
In Renegade, my AIW Radeon 8500DV (in my P4 2.2 system - see sig) runs between 55-60 FPS consistent at 1280x1024 with full trilinear.
The Radeon 9000 was released as a budget card, after the 8500 - it was a modified 8500 but crippled because of its having half the memory pipelines. As a result, the 8500 outperforms the 9000 in almost all apps. Recently, with the launch of the 9600 and 9800, ATI also shipped the Radeon 9200, which is a slightly faster version of the 9000, with AGP 8x. It's not much faster at all, and is outperformed by the 8500.
BTW, AGP 8x, as well as the pathetic trend of having 256MB of video RAM in lower to mid-end cards, is a complete gimmick. As long as your motherboard has AGP 4x, you're fine as far as AGP is concerned - 8x won't bring much of an improvement.
But if you're willing to spend $130, jump for the Radeon 9600 Pro. It's an amazing deal considering what you're getting. The 9600 Pro is a DX9 card and will be able to play future games pretty well (e.g. Half-Life 2, etc.). Although nVidia's GeForce FX series are all DX9 cards, nVidia really screwed up with the DX9 shaders, with the result that their cards are so slow in apps like HL2 that in many cases the ATI Radeon 9600 Pro (which you can get for $130) outperforms nVidia's GeForce FX5900 Ultra, which can be up to $500.
WOL: mbakshi, Radeon980
http://www.techautos.com
P4 2.8C (800 FSB) / ASUS P4P800 Deluxe / 512MB PC3200 DDR / 80GB Maxtor 7200RPM 8MB / ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB / Lite-On 16x DVD-ROM / Win XP Pro / Dell 1800FP 18" LCD / Enermax Case
P4 2.2 / ASUS P4T533-C / 512MB PC1066 RDRAM / 120GB WD 7200RPM / 45GB IBM 7200RPM / ATI AIW Radeon 8500DV 64MB / Cendyne (Pioneer) DVD-RW / Sony CD-RW / Win XP Pro / Nokia 800Pro+ 18" LCD / Aluminum Case
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| Which should I get? (Vid Card) [message #53599] |
Sat, 01 November 2003 19:44 |
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spreegem
Messages: 1755
Registered: March 2003
Location: Ellington, CT
Karma: 0
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General (1 Star) |
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And I GOT THIS ONE! $179 when I bought it. . .
POWERCOLOR ATI RADEON 9600 PRO 256MB DDR DVI+CRT+TV 8X AGP RETAIL
Specifications:
Chipset:RADEON 9600 Pro
Memory: 256MB DDR
Bus: AGP 8X
Core Speed: 400MHz
Memory Speed: 200MHz x2 (400MHz DDR)
Four parallel rendering pipelines process up to 1.6 billion pixels per second
128-bit full floating point precision enables billions of color variations to render the same lighting and effects as Hollywood studios
FULLSTREAM™ removes blocky artifacts from streaming Internet video to deliver smoother looking, higher quality online content
Ports:VGA + DVI + S-Video
Retail Box (see pictures for details) Model#: R96-D3G Special Free FedEx Saver Shipping
(avg rating 5 out of 49 voters)
My Photoshop, PHP, and other crap Tutorial Site
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