2600xt revisited....

This is a possible flame war starter, but try and hold it down to FRIENDLY arguments. :-p

I, like many of you, took a good look at the ati hd 2xxx series when it was first released. To say the least, not many of us were impressed... well, I sure wasn't. It was either fast and super expensive (29xx) in card price and in psu price, or it was not quite the killer card we expected (26xx+24xx) and still cost too much. Well. I implore you to take a second take at one card in the hd series again... The hd 2600xt. I believe it comes in about three flavors.... and thankfully only one is the ginger ale that NOBODY really wants. The 2600xt 256meg gddr3, the 2600xt 512meg gddr3, and the 2600xt 256meg gddr4. yeah, the 256meg gddr3 is the ginger ale.

Here is why i posted. I have looked several times for some way to compare each of the cards and get an idea of which one is going to be the best. but about 99% of the time when a review or benchmark reads "2600xt" it doesn't define which version of the 2600xt it is. I've googled 2600xt and watched some video's to get a decent idea of performance, but the video quality is low, and most people that most those video's have the type of ego that won't admit to buying a crappy card even if they only bought it for a dollar. ANYWAY. I wouldn't mind some input, i'm pretty impressed with it myself at the price range of 75-150 dollars.

side note:I see a lot of "anything below 'blah blah blah card' is crap...the truth is... if you scale it all, 150 dollars for a video card now is still better than 150 dollars for a video card way back when. it's just that the software (games) are much more demanding and ahead of the hardware at times (in terms of gaming anyway)... i remember way back when quake2 just hit the shelves and i didn't know ANYONE person that could max the game out on their system. :-p

yeah, I'm really on a tight budget and i never want to pay more than 150 dollars for a video card it's just a personal preference... because then i might as well buy a console. the HIS 2600 xt 512 gddr3 is overclocked out of the box and i found a review on it... and it seems to beat the other similar cards. and that's at 100 bucks i think. That and the 2900 requires more power, i really don't want to have to buy a massive power supply as well. I'm becoming more power concious. because if i end up having 5 computers in my house (family members, and an htpc) , that's a BIG energy bill if they're all pulling 400 watts from the wall... and i kinda pay half the energy bill... so i dunno. I do heart the 3850 though. the 3870 would be even better... but those prices are out of my and most peoples standard budget.
that and the 2600xt is getting better performance now than it was when it hit the shelf... driver issues? :-p

yeah, the prices are coming down a bit... but it's 100 bucks not 150... i've looked at the 3850. it's just that the performance of the 2600xt is getting better as time goes on... and there are no linux drivers for the 3850. and it's at least 50 bucks cheaper.

nice.... anyone know how long the 3850 is? I'm only going to have 11 inches of clearance... and i need to make sure that if i do end up buying one that I can stuff it in there.

i normally would go nvidia, it's just that they're more expensive, and honestly, I'll never expect a mid range low priced card to do AA in games of the era it was released. I'm not too terribly picky... and i like to save a few dollars and help out the little guy as well. Last time i bought a "mid/high" end card it was 150 bucks, and would run the games of the era just fine. but it wouldn't do AA. I would however expect it to do this for 200 dollars or more.

I did run through that review quickly. And i've searched all over for many others as well. the newer benchmarks is more or less what i'm interested in. I was at first considering the 2600xt gddr4. but i n the newer games such as crysis it gets lower frame rates than the gddr3 512meg i believe due to the limited memory amount/'frame buffer'. but in the older games the 2600xt gddr4 does often beat out the 8600gt. I'm willing to sacrifice AA for the price... But this is also why i considered the 3850, i think the power supply may be able to handle it considering it's only pulling 6amps (after it's done with the pci bus) from the power connector... i just need a lenght measurement that i have not yet been able to find (havn't spent much time looking though cuz i don't have extra money now). but i watched some youtube video's of the 2600xt in action, and i must say, it's not bad.
thanks for the input though.... and i really hate mail in rebates.

haha. yeah. i would as well... but as long as the fps counter and they posted the correct settings information for the video then it'll be okay. I used it as one of my sources for information. there are newer benchmarks out there if you dig deep enough that confirm a healthy gain in performance over release era benchmarks.