Ati Radeon 9600.....need some advice!

Yeh i seen the SE edition in action and it wasn't as good as the 9600 . Lol, matt22 has been sending me PM's saying he knows more about computors than me.....we're only trying to help you matt22 jesus. Don't spam my inbox.

Originally posted by Matt22@Dec 1 2004, 04:55 AM
(thats $10 for those illiterarte americans)

Wait, I was skimming this and saw something of mild interest; were you joking when you misspelled illiterate? Because if not, thats what we Americans call irony.

yeah avoid SE like the plague
128mb of video ram is almost completely unrelevant to the resolution played at also, BTW.
some cards have better kinds of memory than others, and some have faster memory
for example, 128mb of 128 bit DDR(double data rate, basicly on all but higher end cards) will likely outperform the same video card chip thats housing 256mb of 64 bit ram.
the "mb" is how much information is stored on the video card, soleley for textures,which in lamens terms is the amount of details drawn on 3 dimensional objects in applications. the video cards chipset powers the "eye candy", typicaly the manufacturer of the video card will balance the memory speed, amount, type, etc with the overall performance of the chipset, so as to simulate consistency in advanced gaming options
for example
if you had a good chipset but very bad ram, say a 9600 with 128 mb 64 bit ram
you could play at a high resolution(1280x1024+) with high detailed models and shaders shadows water ETC but at the same time you would have to have low detailed textures, which looks bad

in other words
get a good balanced chipset, one negative aspect holds back the entire product
SE models from ATI products and LE models of Nvidia products are the "unbalanced" chipsets, or in some cases, therye balanced in the fact that all the aspects of are the low grade.

if all of that made any sense or not
heres a quick sumary for you

ill bunch your best bets in american dollar price ranges, u do the math from there, and i must recomend www.newegg.com for all computer parts assuming they ship to UK

50-70$range, avoid this, you expect good performance in direct X 8 or earlier games, bad performance in direct X 9 regardless of what the chipset boasts

70-120$ range
avoid nvidia altogether unless ur looking into the 200+ range
in this range look at the lower models of ati that boast no buffs such as XT or PRO models, but hold a good standard model, ati 9600 is what ur aiming for here

120-160$
this is a tricky price range, you can get highest performance possible from mid range chipsets such as the 9600XT or nvidia 5600s
the reason i call thsi price range tricky is because it has a wide range of options,
the radeon 9800 chipset is available in the non pro version and in the SE version, both of which are very good and likely outperform all the 9600;s

at retail stores these 9800s are roughly 200-300 dollars, newegg is the best investment there in any where from 50-150 dollars cheaper

the aforementioned 9800s house the peak of graphic architecture performance and efficiency of the last generation of video cards, now in the shadow of the new Xxxx ATIs and 6x00 nvidias this has caused the price to drop dramticaly on a still amazing graphic chipset

in other words, tigerdirect.com or newegg.com, look for the 128mb Radeon 9800s with the 256bit architecture , but the 128bit ones are good too and a lil cheaper
heres a great bang for your buck 9800 atlantis link, the atlantis is a great low budget consumer alternative, around the same level as the 9800SE
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc....-102-369&depa=1

or if u bump up to 175 dollars this is a regular 9800 and not an SE and has twice the ram, which in this case is good because its the same kind of ram as on the atlantis, but also is a little faster here, its a saphire 9800 256mb, and is probably your best alternative
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc....-131-412&depa=1