Ati Radeon 9700 Pro

[striker]

I am now due for a upgrade of my display card. After all the reviews of the ATI Radeon 9700 Pro, i decided to buy the Radeon. My main use for the card will be the playing of games. Is there any specific make of the Radeon out there that is a cut above the rest? Is it that the different makes uses the same Radeon chipset.
I want to spend my money on a card that you can use for the next few years(hopefully). What do you think aout the Gigabyte card ?

[harrycary]

IMO any high end card will satisfy you. The differences can be very minor let alone measurable. Mainly it's the architecture/design of the CPU that changes. In fact, some of those minor differences will only be utilized by a small percentage of video games.

More memory and use of DDR memory should be factors to consider these days. Nice for taking the load off of your PCs' memory.

btw, ATI is going to stop making graphics cards so support may be an issue down the road.

Buy what you can afford and be happy with it.

I'm sure others will chime in, so read on...Good luck with it.

[Schmiggy_JK23]

why dont you read the read the rest of the thread on that link you posted... the story was incorrect... and if you read that, you would see just that.

[3RA1N1AC]

Originally posted by harrycary@22 June 2003 - 20:33
btw, ATI is going to stop making graphics cards so support may be an issue down the road.

PIFFLE. why are people repeating stories told by "anonymous sources"? read this-- http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/display...0605070910.html

why would ATI retire from the graphics market when they have been running neck-and-neck with Nvidia for a few years, and have actually outpaced Nvidia in the past several months by delivering new & improved cards on time when Nvidia kept pushing their release dates back? ATI also owns the company that supplies graphics chips for GameCube, and they're the obvious second choice to supply graphics chips for the next Microsoft console if MS/Nvidia relationships don't improve.

and the question he asked was "which company makes the best Radeon cards?"

as far as i know, you can't go wrong with "built by ATI" or Sapphire (this company is very closely tied to ATI, and i think they actually are responsible for some "built by ATI" products). i honestly can't comment on other companies' ATI-based cards tho... haven't read enough reviews to know if there's a major difference in quality.

you are correct to believe that the brand could affect the quality though. it's pretty widely known that certain brands of Nvidia cards contain cheaper parts and produce a worse picture than other Nvidia cards, so the same is probably true of ATI-based cards (seeing as how many of the companies building ATI cards are the same ones who also build Nvidia-based cards).

[harrycary]

my bad.