29 replies to this topic

[Jack]

For all you comp gurus out there, what is the best card to get for the money?
ATI or Nvidia? Why and why not?

[Tacit_K]

For all you comp gurus out there, what is the best card to get for the money?
ATI or Nvidia? Why and why not?

I depends on what you want?

Nvidia with the new GF6800 has the most hardware support of future technologies but it still takes a backseat to the ATI9800pro for performance on current technologies. The panel is still out on the x800 chip from ATI (btw x is the roman numeral 10 ie 9800 vs 10800 to keep with ATI naming conventions)

Nvidia is notoriously bad at driver support, a problem ATI seems to have gotten over. The NVidia cards (dustbusters) have huge noisy cooling systems while ATI card are available with heat pipes that seem to do the job well.

And for my final point the new 6800 from Nvidia has two seperate power conectors that according to directions require two plugs on seperate rails and draw more than 100 watts of power so you will need a very robust power supply to run the card.

As for the money issue, it seems that ATI still offers more bang for the buck, I personally refuse to spend more than $150.00 for a video card so $400.00 + video cards are not to be found in my system. I learned this back when I purchased a 12 meg voodoo 3 card for $200.00 and within a month voodoo was old hat and 32 meg cards with accelerators built in were common.

[Boondock Saint]

This is the one I have....highly recommended by Deadly Don who definitley knows his tech shit....IT ROCKS and the website I got it from was awesome customer service,shipping,etc.......and it doesnt break your bank!! Make sure with any card you pick that you have a high enough wattage power supply....This one requires 300W power supply minimum....just my .02

http://www.newegg.co...-145-072&depa=0

[Jack]

Nice card. How is it for porn (lots of it.....)

Do you know what the ATI equivalent is? I have a Nvidia 5800 series card now and I can't decide what I should go with next. I hear a lot of good things about ATI now but it was the other way around not too long ago when it had a lot of probs with their drivers and some cards. Are they that much better than the Nvidia-based cards or is it just a minor diff. but a huge cost diff.?

[Boondock Saint]

Doesnt your 5800 series run pretty good??....Dont know if you would get that much more "improvement" out of another card unless you went with one of the really high end (9800 Pro or 5950) cards.....and even then you might not see a huge difference....

[Enforcer]

It's all about the RAM. I run the ATI 9800 with 756 RAM. I have no problems and have not experienced any computer lag on the games, even with 50 peeps running around Caen. The processor speed is 2.6 gig. I have not found any problems with the ATI products, although I have also heard of other driver problems. I play this, Vietnam, Flight Sim 2004, and LOMAC. I do not have any problems with any of them.

[kaiserD]

I run the ATI 9800 with 756 RAM.

that's a hell of a lot of RAM, enfozer! is that 756 system RAM or on the vid card?

[bbb]

i have 768 RAM

and i might get more!
i'd have an extra 512 RAM on top of the 768 then! some would say that's pointless, and i'd agree, but... you know... i'm a man! why not soup it up until it's so good it's useless!


and P.S. check out the funny pic!

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[Jack]

So the next question is AMD vs Intel? I have an AMD 3000 now with 1 gig of RAM on an Asus A7N8X Deluxe. I want to upgrade to something newer since I've had this PC for about a year now. From what I've seen so far, the newest Intels smoke AMD's 32 and 64 chips. Will that make any diff for game play?

[DeadlyDon]

I currently have an AMD XP 3000 w/1GB RAM and the A7V8X MoBo with an ATI Radeon 9500 Pro w/128MB RAM. I can honestly say that it is way more computing power than I currently need. The CPU is way more than I will need for another year or two to be honest. I'd take a close look at VGA Charts from Tomshardware and other articles on http://www.tomshardware.com before I upgraded your video or CPU. My guess is that more than likely you don't really need to upgrade your CPU or your video card(I think someone mentioned you have the GeForce 5800?). One of the best performance improvements I've made recently was to add RAID stripping. I have two HD's which behave like one drive. The data written to or read from my RAID "drive" is theoretically twice as fast. I've benchmarked and have seen about a 30%-40% improvement. Also, getting a faster HD could make your system faster. I'd consider getting one of the 10K RPM SATA HD's that are on the market now. They are on par with SCSI drives but are a bit cheaper. Better yet, use two or more SATA 10K RPM drives in a RAID stripping array. Good luck!

[Jack]

Thanks DD and all you other fine computer gurus. I forgot to mention that I have 1 SATA drive now and the second one for RAID is on the way.

I like new toys so I am always upgrading. I was just curious to see what you fellow Mooners think and are using to kill me and each other.

I have not used any ATI cards for years now and I was just curious about where the company's product is positioned relative to Nvidia. It is the same with the CPUs. I have seen many reviews that say AMD is a better gaming CPU. However, with the new generation of Intels they are supposed to be better than the AMDs. I think that is what I may do next based on the fact that most of you say that my video card is good enough.

Thanks again.

[Enforcer]

I run the ATI 9800 with 756 RAM.

that's a hell of a lot of RAM, enfozer! is that 756 system RAM or on the vid card?

Kaiser, that is CPU RAM, 128 on the video card.

And Dobby, it all depends on when you are buying. Nvidia will come out with something that beats the greatest ATI has to offer. ATI then comes up with something better. Processors are the same way..this week one thing, and next week something else. Just pick whatever you can afford and go with it.

[LeadPoison]

I agree, the grass is always greener....
It's not like your buying a car or a house....I think I have bought 4 different video cards for my pc in 2 years. I guess my point is, no card you buy will be the best for long, so just buy what gets the job done and what you can afford. I have a nvidia bfg geforce 5900 OC, it gets the job done and is around 200 bucks. It comes overclocked from the factory and also includes a lifetime warranty. I could not be happier with this card.

[Jack]

Hmmmm, green grass good....

Thanks for the help gurus. Must think now. Brain ache starting now...

[Cosa Nostra]

I have also been getting a new video card just about every 6 months or so,
that has left me with several extra video cards I can play with
At this time I am running a Asus A7N8X-X Mobo with 640 megs of 2700 ddr, and a AMD 2800 cpu, as for the video card I now have Ati 9200 radeon.
In the last few days I have been overclocking the video card to see what it would do.To do this with the Ati video cards you have to have a third party software and drivers,I used Omega drivers and Rad linker software to overclock the cards core clock rate and the memory.The only promblem that I have had was cooling so I added a extra case fan.The good side of it is, that when in game I did notice that when I changed weapons that it was a bit faster than normal
Overclocking is RISKY so do so at your own peril. Here are some links that have some info on overclocking. Have fun and good luck
http://www.sysopt.co...icles/VCOGuide/
http://www.overclockers.com/

[Enforcer]

Overclocking=Voodoo=Bad news..

Don't do that unless you really don't mind frying what you have and end up buying new.

[Cosa Nostra]

Yes overclocking can be dangerous,
So all of you out thier that have Nvidia cards , when you overclock and go to far
reboot and hold the Ctrl key to reset the default settings on your card.
I myself have not tried this but I know several that have and it seemed to work for them.
To see how your card is doing in game open the console and type fps 1 to get the frames per sec. fps 0 turns it off.
Becareful have fun and dont try this unless loosing a video is not a main concern

[Jack]

All you overclockers should check out this site:

http://www.abxzone.com/index.php?

Forums are great, not as good as the Moon though

[bbb]

me too dumb fo dis.

i'd like to overclock my processor, but it's a little hot as it is!