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[takemehomegrandma]

Hi. I am upgrading my PC at the moment. I am looking for a quality, high performance 3D gfx card. I want "the best". I have read various tests and it seems like the ATI 9800 pro is beating the GeForce 5800 ultra hands down in almost every aspect, including one of the most important ones; NOISE! I have decided to go the ATI route.

But what brand would you recommend? Hercules? Sapphire?

The 9800 seems to be quite difficult to find in stock though, and that is a problem because I want it *now* ;-). This is one of the reasons I am not interested in upcoming cards like the GF5900 and 9800 with 256 MB DDR2 memory (the price of the latter is another ;-)).

I found a brand called "powercolor" in stock, but I have never heard of that one, and they had a somewhat dodgy website that gave bad impression ...

[Karlos]

Well, there's high-performance, and there's high-performance...

If money is not an issue :-) you could go for one of these...

I think you can get it for under $1000 :-)

-edit-

Incidentally, it wipes the floor with anything either nVidia or ATI have yet come up with (I have seen for myself)...

Karlos wrote:
Well, there's high-performance, and there's high-performance...

If money is not an issue :-) you could go for one of these...

I think you can get it for under $1000 :-)

-edit-

Incidentally, it wipes the floor with anything either nVidia or ATI have yet come up with (I have seen for myself)...

Didn't NVidia buy 3DLabs after they bought 3DFX?

[Karlos]

Dunno. They belong to Creative IIRC. Maybe nVidia bought them too?

-edit-

If they did, how come their cards suck in comparison?

[JoannaK]

One thing about those High end Nvidias is that they do get part of their high marks by cheating on performance tests. There have been quite a big cheats on their drivers to et better benchmark numbers out from 3dMark and (apparently) other softwares used to comparing Gfx cards.

See this pdf file about findings of Futuremark people.

What Is the Performance Difference Due to These Cheats?
A test system with GeForceFX 5900 Ultra and the 44.03 drivers gets 5806 3DMarks with
3DMark03 build 320.
The new build 330 of 3DMark03 in which 44.03 drivers cannot identify 3DMark03 or the tests in
that build gets 4679 3DMarks – a 24.1% drop.

[mikeymike]

I thought the recent customer-orientated ATI high range cards were quite noisy as well?

I'd never buy ATI because of their lack of attention to drivers on all their offerings. From my experience you have to hope that they're paying particular attention to your card. From reinstalling a friend's PC recently with an old ATI chipset in, my past experiences are confirmed once again.

I think it's a bad time to buy high range anything regarding x86 hardware.

I'm currently using a GeForce 4 Ti4200, pretty quiet.

[takemehomegrandma]

Karlos wrote:
Well, there's high-performance, and there's high-performance...

If money is not an issue :-) you could go for one of these...

I think you can get it for under $1000 :-)

-edit-

Incidentally, it wipes the floor with anything either nVidia or ATI have yet come up with (I have seen for myself)...

That one looks cool, but it's
1) More of a workstation card than a gamers card (I want the latter)
2) DirectX 8.1
3) A little too expensive :-P

[bloodline]

Didn't NVidia buy 3DLabs after they bought 3DFX?

No, 3DLabs are now owned by Creative

[takemehomegrandma]

I thought the recent customer-orientated ATI high range cards were quite noisy as well?

They have a fan too, but the noise level is not even close to the latest nvidia cards. The noise from geforce fx is often compared to a vacuum cleaner, and you might actually find it difficult to stay in the same room as the computer for a longer period of time.

[mikeymike]

The GeForce FX really is a waste of space :-)

[mikeymike]

ATI has cheated on benchmark tests as many times as NVIDIA has, if not more.

And anyway, ATI's drivers are currently being investigated by FutureMark after some inconsistencies found as well, which ATI have admitted already :-)

ATI optimising for benchmark tests URL

[Fot]

Hi, I recently purchased a Powercolor 9500 Evil Commando X with 128MB. It's cheap and based on the ATi 9500 reference design. Was able to convert to a 9700 (enable the locked 4 pipelines) using the software mod. The DirectX9 ATi Radeon
demos are amazing. The NVidia
Dawn demo is great to show off.

[KennyR]

I got an ATI 9000. It may not be the fastest card on the market but has no fan at all and is hardly the slowest either. And the best thing is I don't have to use it with a crap OS. ;-)

[Karlos]

takemehomegrandma wrote:
That one looks cool, but it's
1) More of a workstation card than a gamers card (I want the latter)
2) DirectX 8.1
3) A little too expensive :-P

True, it is a workstation card but, OpenGL compilant stuff runs very nicely indeed - including games ;-)

It's fully OGL2 compliant too, so shaders and the like are no problem. As for DX8, there probably are shader-centric drivers available - 3DLabs are very good in that respect.

As for cost, well heh, you got a point there...

[downix]

I like the PowerVR-based cards myself, but try findind one of the new
ones.