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#1
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Best Bang For The Buck Under or just over $100
Hi all. I'm going to be building a PC for my daughter, the Wolfenstein addict.
What's the best ATI card for the money right now under $100. I've had a Sapphire 8500LE that's been quite stable. Do they still make good products? I see a Sapphire 9200 256meg for $69 at Newegg but have some input that the way to go is with 9600 or higher which does strain the budget. Thanks for any advice. |
#2
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On 6/20/2004 5:40 AM SpicaTC50 brightened our day with:
Hi all. I'm going to be building a PC for my daughter, the Wolfenstein addict. What's the best ATI card for the money right now under $100. I've had a Sapphire 8500LE that's been quite stable. Do they still make good products? I see a Sapphire 9200 256meg for $69 at Newegg but have some input that the way to go is with 9600 or higher which does strain the budget. Thanks for any advice. I'll be selling my "Built By ATI" Radeon 9600 Pro for ~$100 really soon, I'm not trying to sell it to you but if you look around at used cards you'll find a lot of them out there on ebay or your local classifieds for that price. Mine's in perfect shape, less than a year old, I just want to get a 9800. If you happen to live in Northern California let me know. Besides all that I put a PowerColor Radeon 9200 256 Mb bought from newegg.com for ~$90 that went into a pretty crappy old 933 MHz Celeron that's doing a great job, plays RTCW great and does a decent job handling newer games like Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow. Sapphire's good too, these 9200s with 256 Mb is just a gimmick, the extra 128 Mb does almost nothing. The main thing to check is that you're getting a card that's memory bus is 128 bit rather than 64. -- “The braying sheep on my TV screen Make this boy shout, make this boy scream!" Steve [Inglo] |
#3
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I'd get the 9600 ultimate with the passive cooler from Sapphire w 128mb -
you will get little benefit from more memory with a slower processor. Take a look on pricewatch.com for vendors and price - while it is about $150 it is quiet fast and gives your the potential to play more demanding games with greater detail as they become available. "SpicaTC50" wrote in message ... Hi all. I'm going to be building a PC for my daughter, the Wolfenstein addict. What's the best ATI card for the money right now under $100. I've had a Sapphire 8500LE that's been quite stable. Do they still make good products? I see a Sapphire 9200 256meg for $69 at Newegg but have some input that the way to go is with 9600 or higher which does strain the budget. Thanks for any advice. |
#4
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"SpicaTC50" wrote in message
... Hi all. I'm going to be building a PC for my daughter, the Wolfenstein addict. What's the best ATI card for the money right now under $100. I've had a Sapphire 8500LE that's been quite stable. Do they still make good products? I see a Sapphire 9200 256meg for $69 at Newegg but have some input that the way to go is with 9600 or higher which does strain the budget. Thanks for any advice. If you can find a reputable eBay seller it might be possible to get a fairly high-end card for about $100- I got a 9700 for £70 (UK, about $130 US). Give it a go- look out for the 9700s, 9500s (there is one type of 9500 that is software moddable into a 9700), and 9600s. OTOH, if she's just playing Wolfenstein (I assume not the early '90s one!) why not find an old GF4 Ti? -- Martin Francis http://www.sixbysix.co.uk "Go not to Usenet for counsel, for it will say both no, and yes, and no, and yes...." |
#5
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"SpicaTC50" wrote in message
... Hi all. I'm going to be building a PC for my daughter, the Wolfenstein addict. What's the best ATI card for the money right now under $100. I've had a Sapphire 8500LE that's been quite stable. Do they still make good products? I see a Sapphire 9200 256meg for $69 at Newegg but have some input that the way to go is with 9600 or higher which does strain the budget. Thanks for any advice. Return to Castle Wolfenstein should be just fine with a 9200 video card. Try not to get the SE version, but even it would probably be fine. After all, I originally ran RTCW on a Celeron 800 with a GeForce2 MX AGP and it was pretty smooth (although not absolutely 100%) in 800x600x32 resolution. But let me put things into perspective based on my own experience with regards to video cards... I just upgraded my second computer. It's now running an Athlon XP 2500+ processor on a Gigabyte GA-7N400-L motherboard and a pair of PC3200 CAS3 Kingston memory sticks (dual channel mode). On this machine, I have a Radeon 9200SE 128MB AGP video card. My 3DMark2001SE score is 4216 at default settings with this newly upgraded system with a fresh OS install and updated drivers. My big computer is a P4 2.8GHz system with a Gigabyte GA-8IPE1000 Pro motherboard and 1GB of PC3200 CAS3 Kingston memory in dual channel mode as well. Video card is a built-by-ATI Radeon 9800 Pro with 128MB. My 3DMark2001SE score on this system is 15,900...more than ten thousand points higher! My point is, although I did expect this type of a result, it says a lot about the gap in performance between video cards. I can draw this comparison largely because the performance difference between the processors on my two systems isn't very wide now. |
#6
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"SpicaTC50" wrote in message ... Hi all. I'm going to be building a PC for my daughter, the Wolfenstein addict. What's the best ATI card for the money right now under $100. I've had a Sapphire 8500LE that's been quite stable. Do they still make good products? I see a Sapphire 9200 256meg for $69 at Newegg but have some input that the way to go is with 9600 or higher which does strain the budget. Thanks for any advice. Don't get a 9200 card of any kind. It's a DX 8.1 card, RV280 core with AGP8X support, but 4 pipelines with one TMU per pipe and even slower memory than your 8500LE. The 9200 Pro has the same core and memory speed. Your existing 8500 has 4 pipelines with 2 TMU per pipe. Seeing as how a full bore 8500 can't fill the AGP4X bandwidth, AGP8X compatibility is pointless. It'll be outperformed by your 8500LE. Best value is to pick up a 9600 Pro, which is DX9 and considerably faster memory and core. Avoid the 9600SE....that's a step down in speed with DX9 support. |
#7
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"SpicaTC50" wrote in message ... Hi all. I'm going to be building a PC for my daughter, the Wolfenstein addict. What's the best ATI card for the money right now under $100. I've had a Sapphire 8500LE that's been quite stable. Do they still make good products? I see a Sapphire 9200 256meg for $69 at Newegg but have some input that the way to go is with 9600 or higher which does strain the budget. Thanks for any advice. Don't get a 9200 card of any kind. It's a DX 8.1 card, RV280 core with AGP8X support, but 4 pipelines with one TMU per pipe and even slower memory than your 8500LE. The 9200 Pro has the same core and memory speed. Your existing 8500 has 4 pipelines with 2 TMU per pipe. Seeing as how a full bore 8500 can't fill the AGP4X bandwidth, AGP8X compatibility is pointless. It'll be outperformed by your 8500LE. Best value is to pick up a 9600 Pro, which is DX9 and considerably faster memory and core. Avoid the 9600SE....that's a step down in speed with DX9 support. |
#9
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"Mark" wrote in message
... The difference might be because the AMD 2500+ has a operating frequency of 1.83GHz, compared to your 2.8GHz "big computer". That's a ~1GHz difference between the processors. That's true, but AMD and Intel engineered their processors differently. This is why AMD went with the Pentium rating system (i.e. 2500+). |
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