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It seems the large majority of gamers and overclockers seem to prefer using Radeon cards. The 9800pro is the big winner with most. I am half considering a purchase of an FX card but have no idea where it falls on the price/performance ladder.
If I was to restrict my purchase to an NVidia card where would my money be best spent?
This is a chart of the latest cards and their performance. Thought it might be handy for anyone in a similar situation.
I think most people are pretty objective when it comes to what graphics card to buy. Ever since the 9700 Pro came out, ATi has had an edge over nVidia in the medium to high-end graphics card stakes.Quote:
It seems the large majority of gamers and overclockers seem to prefer using Radeon cards.
If you want to know what card to buy then Custom PC magazine is a good purchase. The issue I saw had a benchmark of all the different cards, with a comparison on pure performance and a comparison on performance-per-$$$.
I think that most of the community got annoyed at Nvidia when it became obvious how many 'cheats' were in their drivers. Now I'm all for optomization - as long as it doesn't impact visual quality - but some of their drivers actually missed out objects from benchmarks (and I'm not going to go into bi/tri linear arguments).
Having seen the difference in picture quality between the Nvidia and ATi cards when I put in a 9700 (from a Ti4200) - its remarkable (I suddenly found out my desktop background - a nebula at the time - had red bits - they were purple under Nvidia, and yes I did check the RGB values).
with a 9600XT in your machine, for better performance you're really looking at a 5950 (uurgh) or a 9800Pro or XT. IMO the XT is not worth the 100quid extra over the Pro.
You could always wait a couple of months - I believe the next gen is due in April.
I love NVidia... as I've not moved beyond my GF3.
if you have to have a nvidia card id either get a ti 4200 or for a few quid extra a ti4600
as their dx9 cards suck
I never thought I'd buy another Nvidia card, but I just have.
In other threads here I was deliberating between buying either a 9600XT or 9800 Pro, but couldn't make my mind up. Then somebody on this Forum posted a link to a Dabs offer, Aopen FX5900 for £146.00 delivered. So I bought one.
This thing is huge, ugly, well cooled and needs the Molex power connector. But, imo, it's good. It replaced an ATI/Hercules 128Mb 8500 and the difference, to my mind, is huge. I'm playing Halo at a decent res now without any stuttering during the intense action parts and COD looks and runs great.
Furthermore, I've overclocked it to 5950 speeds and it's holding steady, only glitch is I'm getting occasional 'sparkles' sortta 'misplaced pixels' in 2D mode when it's overclocked, but if I open a window or two and return to desktop, they go away.
But, I may flash this card with the Leadtek 5950 Bios, that ups the core voltage a little and all should be good. I'm giving it a week or two overclocked to see how it holds up before flashing Bios.
I'm a big fan of ATI cards, but at that price, the FX5900 was too good to pass up on. It's a DX9 card and imo, doesn't suck at all :P