Card brand vs GPU

How much difference is there between cards with the same GPU and amount of memory but from different manufactuers? Is it purely down to extras that come packaged with it and warranties etc?

I ask because I'm thinking of getting a GeForce 7900GS 256mb, and the best price I've found is one from Innovision costing $286.60 AUD. An Asus, on the other hand, is $356.62. Is there anything I should be wary of about buying the cheaper card? (I really don't care about bundled software).

Warranty, support and build quality are the differences. A cheaper brand likely will use some cheaper components and may not be soldered as well. It's best to buy trusted brands, but then the less expensive one may work out just fine.

Not really, quality is usually about same, it's not really a factor.

I disagree, Prozac.

The thing comes down to the quality of the components, which may affect overclockability.

For instance, I have a Radeon 9800SE , from Powercolor. It uses cheap memory chips, so it begins to be unstable even at low overclock settings.

The 9800SE is highly overclockable and can also be tweak to enable more pipelines. That's not the case with the Powercolor products

Ok, I saw my mistake there... a bit of confusion. thanks.

the question is that the memory chips are the cheapest chips, and the card will not overclock well, giving artifacts at low OC's settings.

I admit the pipelines have nothing to do with memory chips. HOWEVER, if powercolor didn't buy the cheapest GPUs, lowest rating GPUs, they would have a card could be flashed to a 9800PRO, or have 4 pipelines unlocked.

Not all GPUs are the same. Take, for instance, the R480 (since I am talking about the 9800 line). There are many different R480, quality-wise. The ones that pass with flying colors in ATI's quality assurance are sold for a higher price, because they guarantee better results. These chips will power the 9800 and 9800PRO cards. There are manufacturers, however, that will buy these GPUs to power 9800SE cards. Manufacturers like PowerColor will buy not the best ones, but the least expensive ones to power their products. Thus the difference in price.

So, even if a 9800SE from PowerColor seems to be the same as a 9800SE from Asus (for example) and the specs may be exactly the same, the Asus product is a more reliable one, because the GPU came from a different batch.

Uh, ATI does the binning, like any chip manufacturer.

They will offer up the good chips to be made into 9800Pros, the slightly less good chips to be made into 9800s and the worse chips to be made into 9800SEs.

Card manuf's will go to ATI and go "we need 10,000 Pros, 50,000 9800s and 100,000 SEs" and ATI will go "here you go, that'll be $loadsamoney"


The "being able to unlock things" occurs when ATI suddenly realises that they have 100,000 9800 capable chips in stock and no 9800SEs - because people are buying more SEs - the chip makers always sell more of the lower speed-binned chips, because their price is lower!

So ATI goes "right, we'll re-mark some of these 9800s as 9800SEs", does some careful software munging to make them not run as 9800s any more, and sells them on.

The manufacturer who buys 100,000 SEs might end up with 50,000 genuine SEs, and 50,000 ones which used to be vanilla 9800s.

It's pot luck as to which one you get, not the card manufacturers.



This is slightly different now - frequently chip manufacturers try to make it a hardware mod so you can't change the chip back - an example is the E6300 and E6400 Core 2 Duos - they've physically got 2Mb of L2 cache per core, but 1Mb of it per core is disabled in hardware.

I'm not going to overclock, so that's not an issue. I guess it couldn't hurt to look at what extras do actually come with cards and weigh up what it would likely cost me to buy them myself and which ones I'm likely to want anyway.

As for how long I'm going to keep the card... well, probably longer than two years.

It's good to hear that Innovision's cards are pretty close to benchmark values because the benchmarks from this site are exactly what I've based my choice of card on.

Thanks for the advice, everyone