i am a serious gamer, and i want to upgrade my computer in time for christmas. So i wanted to know your opinion on which of the following graphics cards would be best for the job i want to do:
Sapphire Radeon X1300 256MB (PCI)
Sparkle GF 6600 512MB (PCI)
Gigabyte GF 6600 Turbo SLI 128MB (PCI)
Any other graphics cards within the price range of £0-£100
Also, does the memory of the card only effect the preformance, or is there other things that matter?

Thanks

The amount of memory is almost the least important feature of a memory card.

The stuff that affects performance is the Chipset, memory bus, clockspeeds, and amount of memory... in that order.

See if you can find a 6600GT... the GT is important because it means the clockspeeds are higher than a regular 6600.

If you can't afford an actual 6600GT, find out the clockspeeds on the regular 6600's you've listed. Pick the one with the faster speeds.

Is the Gigabyte GF 6600 Turbo SLI 128MB a good choice, or is the Sparkle GF 6600 512MB DDR PCI-E better?

Thanks

I don't know offhand, you'll have to look up the clockspeeds.

The Geforce 6600 has a memory spped of 550mhz, and the Gigabyte one has a memory clock speed of 1 GHZ, which would be better? Also, on Battlefield 2 it says a 256MB card is recommended compared to a 128MB. How is that true if memory doesn't matter?

Thanks

The bargain card of choice right now is the 256mb 6800GS which you can pick up for $209

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6814130258

Or here is a good deal on the 6600GT for $119.99
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6814125156

BTW a slower card with more memory (ie regular 6600) is not going to out perform say a 128mb 6600GT. If you are really a hard core gamer look for a card that offers the best memory speeds and # of memory pipelines. For example the 6600GT has 8 pipelines where as the 6800GS has 12 and the 7800GT has 20 and so on.

He's in the UK - can't buy from Newegg and prices are likely higher than here...

Laid: Need the core and memory clock speeds for both GPUs - you have to compare apples to apples. Do you have links to them?

I know this is out of your budget but one of the best deals you can get is a Saphire x800GTO2 modded to X850XT PE with a simple bios flash. But do a standared OC to make sure the card can run at such high speeds. Otherwise modify the bios that you are going to flash it with to reduce the speeds.

Modding it to X850XT PE will not only get you higher speeds on core and memory, but will get you 16 pipes instead of 12!

-dragonx