? posted by scary_jeff

Wild, the cheaper one is a 9600, not a 9600XT. It won't perform as well by a significant margin. It is a nightmare buying any computer part, you just have to go for it. whatever you buy, you could have spent a little less for something not quite as fast, or a little more for something a bit faster, and whatever you buy (bar RAM), you could have got it cheaper if you had waitied a month. These are two unavoidable facts that you have to accept before you go ahead and buy something OK Crono, well I like Asus and I'm not changing. We all have our hardware predjudices, mine is against VIA I suppose another reason it's more expensive is because of the Intel chipset, but i like them to

No s**t! I paid 67$ for both my sticks of RAM and they are now sold at 89$... ahh isnt it good when stuff is priced to order

I guess since we're all talking Radeon though, that the FX series cards kinda went out the door lol. Bah, the 9600XT has higher clocks and as someone stated, on the ASUS board, its got plenty of overclocking potential... backed by my 4 case fans

But is it better to get the 9600XT or one of the 9800 cards? I'd be thinking of staying with the 9600XT since all the 9800 cards are really darn expensive. And looking at comparisons from ATi's website, there arent that many things better with the 9800. 4 more pipelines, higher RAM clocks, lower GPU clock, more textures..

http://apps.ati.com/ATIcompare/

Go there and compare the 9600XT, the 9800Pro, and the 9800XT. Prices are: 237$, 467$, and 587$ respextively.

http://www.pccyber.ca/scrItems.asp?product_subtypes_id=287&product_types_id=26

Yet again, don't look at the ATI suggested price, you can get it cheaper by 100 bucks for the 9800 Pro...Look at outside shops and not from ATI directly (strange but true, it's cheaper to get it from an outside source than directly from ATI.)