My trusty GeForce4 died on me tonight so I need to buy a new graphics card over the weekend. I’ve decided to go for a Radeon 9800 or 9700 depending on what people recommend. There are lots of different brands to choose from, all with different prices. Does anyone recommend a specific brand of card?
I’m interesed in stability mostly, since I’d prefer my next upgrade to be on my own terms. 
Generally the story is ATI cards have a little more performance then a comparable Nvidia, but the Nvidia software is a bit more stable.
Before we get into flamewar territory though, I’ll say this. I’ve found nightmare stories and success stories for every brand on the planet. I recently put a new box together from the ground up and bought a 9200 (it was $99 IIRC) as an inexpensive card to hold the fort until I upgraded. My computer would crash after 10 minutes, so I reinstalled the OS, but it would still crash. I tried it on 98, 2000, and XP, and it would crash crash crash. I tried to download new drivers, guess what happened? I figured the card must be defective, so I returned it, and decided I might as well go level higher, because I had now had a credit from the old card and some cash in my pocket. I got an ATI 9600, same 'ol story, DR. Crash. I did some research and found that loads of people hated ATI and their software. I also found out that their mothers never loved them, but that’s a whole diff story.
What’s the point you’re asking?
I swore off ATI forever, I told everyone I knew never, ever, buy anything from this company. I ended up buying an Nvidia and the same thing happened with that card. I finally discovered that I had a bad DIMM of ram that was causing me my problems.
I take other people’s bitching stories with a grain of salt now, so you should too.
In terms of a good card, the 9700 and 9800 are the top of the line. They are popular and supported well, and aside of the usual good/bad stories, people are very happy with them.
There are several different companies (Hercules, PNY, etc) that offer their version, but I personally would go with the ATI all in wonder 9700. If you want some multimedia capability go with the all in wonder, if you want straight performance go with the plain 9800.
This post didn’t make much sense, probably because I’m not much of a morning person. 
I’m an online gamer so I get to hear things about video cards all the time. In general, for desktops, it seems overall performance goes to ATI but overall compatibility to Nvidia. Alas, ATI seems more prone to burning out prematurely.
So, if you need superior graphics capabilities, go with ATI. If you want reliability and don’t need all the bells and whistles, stick with Nvidia. Nvidia tends to be more economical, but a small step behind ATI in technology.
If you go with ATI, pay attention to the whole model number (i.e. 9800SE), not just the number (9800). A 9700 Pro outperforms a 9800SE, for instance.
Here’s a very informative thread from the Ars Technica forums: http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/ubb.x?a=tpc&s=50009562&f=67909965&m=844003222631 Page two has a recent update.
And I’ve heard good things about Sapphire brand cards (with the ATI chipset) and the cards manufactured by ATI itself. But, yeah, grain of salt.
You should be here then- it’s afternoon, and the sun is shining
By the way, I understood your post.
I liked my Voodoo5. Would have loved to get my hands on a Voodoo6…
:mad:
Sapphire is an excellent brand - in fact, they actually make some of “ATI built” branded cards. - Right now, www.newegg.com is having a sale on -
Sapphire Radeon 9800 Pros for only $199.
One brand to stay away from is Powercolor. They have a terrible reputation on the net. And one more thing to watch out for - ATI uses XT at the end of cards to designate a faster version - a Radeon 9600 XT is faster than a Radeon 9600 Pro. But Nvidia’s GeforceFX 5900 XT is actually a SLOWER version of the GeforceFX 5900.
Don’t forget, too, that you can compare cards by the amount of RAM and the clock speed of the onboard chipset. Those numbers don’t lie, and all sites should post the specs. That’s a lot easier than figuring out XT and pro, etc.
I agree with everyone here… ATI or Nvidia are your choices.
I bought an ATI 9600 pro 256MB ddr, and I love it. When i got it, the clock speed was slightly less than the 9700 series, but the 9700 series was only offering 128 MB of RAM. For the massive price difference, (mine was 200 at the time, and the 9700 series was over 400) I figured I couldn’t go wrong.
I’ve bought saffire products before, and I liked them. Especially for the price.
My only experience with Nvidia was with my fiance’s computer. It came with an Nvidia card, and once I tried to put an ATI on it, and the screen was constantly fuzzy. It was the weirdest thing. I got the feeling that the Nvidia software never fully uninstalled. Since I build all of mine from the ground up, I’ve never run into that problem.
PS, I use all AMD CPU’s.
OK here goes…
This is my view from assembling well over 20 computers over the past 6 months using video cards from the lowly TNT2 to the ATI All in wonder 9800 Pro.
Sapphire and power color are good ATI video cards. They work just as well as ATI brand.
Nvidia is the same with the other brands. They all work pretty well. The difference with the brands is what extras they give with it.
ATI has the performance crown over NVidia but it’s not by much especially if your computer is on the older side of the spectrum.
ATI chips are better than Nvidia in Direct x9 games using pixel shader 2.0 so games like Halflife 2 will run better on ATI and it’s a big difference.
The best overall deal for Nvidia cards is the 5900XT.
For ATI, the best deal is the 9600 Pro. although the 9800 pro is coming down in price fast.
Make sure that all BIOS are updated when you install the new video card.
Make sure you have all the newest video drivers.
I myself have an ATI All in wonder 9800 Pro and it has never given me problems at all and is a speed demon. And the video capture is superb.
I did have an issue installing a sapphire 9800 pro into an ASUS a7v8x-x motherboard. but the issue was ASUS needed updated BIOS and via drivers.
A bit on the older side and Tom’s hardware isn’t always the best hardware site… but here is a benchmark comparison of a whole bunch of video cards.
http://www4.tomshardware.com/graphic/20031229/index.html
I was going to mention Tom’s Hardware, but as usual I’m too slow.
btw I’m not much of an afternoon person either Vetch 
How does a Saphire Atlantis 9600XT with 256 RAM sound? Will that last me as long performance wise as my 4200 has?
How about an HIS Excalibur 9600 XT TURBO (650mhz)? Does the turbo mean anything real, speed wise?
They’re both about the same price, which is about 100 dollars cheaper than the 9800.
What price are you getting for those cards? - the cheapest I can find for a Radeon 9600XT is $150; a Radeon 9800 Pro, which is a much faster card, can be had at www.newegg.com for $199.
Also, that HIS Excailibur Radeon 9600 XT Turbo has its memory clocked at 650mhz; the standard 9600 XT has memory clocked at 600mhz. This would probably be the better buy - few games need more than 128meg (or even 64meg) video RAM unless you really crank up the resolution/AA/Anitrophic filtering, and then this card would choke before you could use that much memory.
ATI has a bit of a performance edge overall (echoing previous posters, www.tomshardware.com is a great place to go for all sorts of discussions about video cards) and one thing that I really like is that their cards tend to have smaller heatsinks and fans than the nVidia. ATI drivers have made great strides recently, they used to be a real pain in the butt but I haven’t had any problems for years, they’re on par with nVidia.
Last I heard, there wasn’t anything out there that made use of a 256mb card vs. a 128mb card - you can pay for the extra RAM but at least for now it doesn’t do much in terms of extra performance.
Faster clock speeds results in better performance all other things being equal but all other things are not equal - Tom’s has a good overview but different models of video cards might run at slower clock speeds but have wider pipes or more pipes and so they do a lot more in each clock cycle. Kinda like the old RISC vs. CISC, or AMD vs. Intel clock speed arguments. The newer cards (8 pipes instead of 4) work faster even at slower clock speeds.
I got an ATI 9800 Radeon Pro (128mb) for about $250 (that’s including tax and 2nd day air shipping) here in the US and it runs very nicely - no louder than my older ATI Radeon 7200, and I run Far Cry at the highest video settings with no hiccups.
Reviews I saw compared the 9800 Pro to the 9800 XT w/256mb (ATI’s top of the line card, and the fastest thing on the market) and while the XT was faster, it was only about a 10% increase in frame rates and that’s running at very high resolutions and frame rates. Both of them outpaced the nVidia 5950. If you are a professional “Quake” player or something maybe it’s worth it but for most of us it’s overkill (and costs at least twice as much).
My advice? Figure out what you can afford to spend, do your research to narrow it down to 2-3 choices and then go for any one of them, I doubt you’ll have any problems. A card that kicks major butt should be in the $150-$250 range. You can spend a lot more ($400-500) but I don’t think you’ll get much for the extra money. You can also spend a lot less (nVidia 5200 is about $65 locally) and get something that will do a great job for most games, it’ll just start to creak on the latest stuff (my roomie’s PC is identical to mine, his 5200 won’t run Far Cry past 800x600 and low resolution…which is still pretty cool).
Hope that helps!
I got a 9800 Pro w/ 128 RAM.
Thanks all!