Well, I went Thanxgiving shopping for the only time in my life and got myself a 9600XT 128MB all in wonder card ... it costs me 124$ after all rebates and stuff is done ... is it worth it or should i return it for 9800 PRO ?

the 9800 pro is much faster, especially if you get the 256 bit one

ya ... but then its gonna cost me another $60 ..and i have already burnt 500$ today

The 128-bit version is a complete waste of money. The 128 MB version however is a good deal. I have one.

^ he said it

so should i keep the 9600XT or return it for 9800 pro ?

Will any of your games need the 9800 Pro?

You'll be just fine with either

Heh, I got the 9800 PRO for 150$ from CompUSA after price matching it with Circuit City ... no more worries now

Doom 3 and HL 2 here i come !!!

The 9600 is like buying a new Pentium 3 nowadays. Best to get a 9800 as your 9600 won't last you long at all.

got myself a 9800 pro thank you

While the 9800 Pro definetly is not the best card on the market, it is definetly the best bang for your buck.

And if you're interested in getting more out of it (overclocking and modding and such) talk to me.

ive got a thermaltake super vga cooler 2 on my 9800pro 256mb... what kind of programs and such do you recommend for some safe and effective overclocking?

so did you get the 128-bit memory bus one or the 256-bit memory bus 9800 Pro (i think all the ones made now are 256-bit bus, and to be honest, if i was gonna spend about that much on an ATI card i'd get the x700 xt/pro)

now i need to find cheap 512 MB of RDRAM !!! GOD I HATE DELL DESKTOPS

All the X series cards except the X800s are all PCI-E, and I'm quite sure he's using AGP...

The Radeon 9800 Pro though is a good buy though. I've had mine for almost 6 months now and it runs all the games I have flawlessly...

Well, I suggest you flash your BIOS to that of a 9800 XT if you have the right GPU: http://www.rojakpot.com/showarticle.aspx?a...artno=92&pgno=0

Well i would suggest the new "Dual Nvidia 6800 GT's SLI" but thats gonna cost you a damn fortune, but if you can afford it, you will be able to run any game at completely full settings for atleast the next 3 years if the games keep progressing like HL2 did.

http://nvidia.com/page/sli.html <-- Nvidia's SLI technology(just in case you dont know what it is)

Yeah, ATI's comes out next year. F-load of money though.

Thanks for that link, I might actually consider modding mine, as I've been wanting to buy a new cooler for it anyways. I was thinking VGA Silencer Rev. 3 as I've heard they're quite good, and it's only about 20 bucks.

And I heard ATI's next card will be the X850. Here's some info:

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=19813

all the x#00 cards come in AGP, only some of them come in PCI-E

I have the All in wonder 9600XT, I guess after reading this thread, I should return it for a 9800 pro.

Well right now they're only PCI-E, I searched around and couldn't find a single X700, X600 or X300 that was AGP.....

It wouldn't make much sense as they're similar to current 9XXX series cards...

I think I've explained this earlier, but RDRAM is some excellent technology. It just wasn't carried out correctly

now i need to remove one of the 2 cdroms in order to install the front controller face thingy for the sound card damn my luck

Is RDRAM really that much better than DDR? I mean, I know it's not worth-the-money better, but price aside, how much is it better?

actually with the now widespread use of dual channel ram configurations, DDR tends to be faster than RDRAM, RDRAM had to run in dual channel always, so to buy ram you always had to buy to exact sticks in pairs and replace your old memory (or add if you had more slots), and RDRAM is hideously more expensive than DDR, which is why it never really grabbed on like it should have, because when it was first released it was very very fast compared to existing memory solutions, now it's kinda left in the dust, especiallt with DDR2 and GDDR3 memory out now (though there are no motherboards or modules of GDDR3, it's only on video cards for now)

Hrm, this seems like a good place to ask my question.

My computer is an AthlonXP 1700+ (1.5ghz) with 512MB of SDRAM, and the video is a GeForce4 MX 64MB. First of all, would upgrading the video card even improve performance that much? Or are the other components too low-end to matter? I could add more memory to the case, but upgrading the processor is not going to happen.

Second of all, although I have an AGP slot, my case is Micro-ATX, and as a result I have a limited physical space to work with. This means that giant-sized fans and other on-card components cannot be much taller than the height of the metal end-peice.

If anyone has any suggestions or recommendations to help me, that would be much appreciated. The only thing really holding me back from purchasing a 3d card right now are those two issues I just mentioned above.

In response to issue #1: YES, a new video card will help you a lot; at this point, it's the crappiest part of your computer.

#2 Fitment is difficult; I just looked at my MSI GeForce FX5900XT and, although it's pretty damn low-profile, I couldn't say whether or not it would fit in your Shuttle. If it did, it would fit by just a couple millimeters.

Well the thing is, I had a Radeon 9000 Pro, and a 1.3GHz computer, and my CPU couldn't handle it, and was a sort of bottleneck for the gfx card.

A new graphics card will help, although you don't need a great one. There'd be no point in spending 300 bucks on one, because you wouldn't get the most performance out of it. RAM is always nice to have, as it takes some load off the CPU, and allows it to run a bit faster since it won't always be writing stuff to virtual memory and what not. RAM certainly makes a difference when gaming with loading times and what not, but with 512MB of it, I'd upgrade the gfx card first to something fairly decent like a 9550 series or even a 9600 series.