9800 pro 128 vs 256?

urian

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How big is the difference between a 9800 pro with 128 mb and one with 256 mb?
The buyers guide lists the 9800 pro 128 mb as "best buy" in it's class but I've read lots of posts where people have said "Be sure to get the 256 mb".
 

david__t

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Tom did a review a while back stating that at the time, the 256MB was not worth the extra cash, and was in fact, marginally slower in some benchmarks. In the future, nobody know whther any engines will make use of 256 MB but people always say "get 256 version" just to be future proof I guess.

I have the 128MB version and I still get over 5000 in 3D mark 2003.

4.77MHz to 4.0GHz in 10 years. Imagine the space year 2020 :)
 

urian

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The 256mb is still almost 50% more than the 128 and I'll most likely get a new card within a year. The thing I'm concerned with ('til then) is playing Bloodlines, HL2 and Doom 3.
 

TheRod

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I've read lots of posts where people have said "Be sure to get the 256 mb".
There is confusion here...

I'll explain it to you, There is different things to check when you get a Radeon 9800 based card.

First, the amount of memory you need/want. 128Megs is enough with this generation of video card. So buying 256Megs version is not worth the extra money, you will not gain any performance (or you will gain just a bit that you will only notice on benhmarks results and not in games).

Second, the memory bus width, there is 2 possibilities : 128bit or 256bit. <font color=red>NEVER buy</font color=red> a Radeon 9800 PRO based board with a 128bit bus width, thuis half-sized bus really hurt the performance of the Radeon 9800 GPU.

Many people were concerned because Sapphire try to sold Radeon 9800 PRO with a 128bit bus but the official Radeon 9800 PRO <b>MUST</b> have a 256bit bus.

<b>Se be sure the card you want to buy have these specs :
Radeon 9800 PRO GPU @ 380MHz
128Megs of RAM @ 680MHz (or DDR340)
256bit memory bus (<font color=red>not 128bit</font color=red>)</b>

Some card will be clocked around 380 and 680, not necessarly the exact same speed. But you don't need to care about that if the speed are - 2 or 3 MHz. More than that, you potential card might have cheap RAM or heatsink. But usually, you will never find a Radeon 9800 PRO at slower speed than the ATI specs.

--
It's tricky to use words like <b><font color=green>AMD</font color=green></b> or <b><font color=blue>Intel</font color=blue></b> in a signature some users could think your are biased.
 

xeenrecoil

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heya Urian;

Well as you have probably already read, the specs for medium detail is 2.4Ghz, 1GB ram, and R9800, now how acurate this is we will see on Aug 5th, unless the specs are posted at doom3.com before the release date.
 

urian

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Well as you have probably already read, the specs for medium detail is 2.4Ghz, 1GB ram, and R9800, now how acurate this is we will see on Aug 5th, unless the specs are posted at doom3.com before the release date.
Yeah, but I've got all those other than the 9800 nailed down already :smile: . Plus, D3 is the one of those 3 games (Bloodlines, HL2 and D3) that I have the least urge to play.