9600 or FX5500 ?

[RoLLi]

I've got a bunch of older components lying around here and decided to put a system together. My current rig is a 450 mhz Gateway... so anything will be an upgrade for me. I'm not a big gamer, but enjoy being able to play some of the newer stuff if I can. Mostly, I use my computer for Photoshop (and need a better rig for the newest version of PS). The motherboard I have is a Mercury/Kobian KT266a FDSUX with a 4xAGP slot. An AMD Duron 1.8GHz Socket A Processor is going on the MB. I plan on installing 1 Gig of either 184 pin DDR SDRAM or a Gig of 168 pin SDRAM, I'm not sure which yet. Anyways, looking around, I've come up with two video cards that aren't too expensive that might fit my bill. The following:

CHAINTECH nVIDIA GeForce FX5500 Video Card, 256MB DDR, DVI/TV-Out, 4x/8X AGP, Model "SA5500T2"
or
ROSEWILL RADEON 9600 Video Card, 256MB DDR, 128-bit, DVI/TV-Out, 4x/8X AGP, Model "RW9600-256D"

They're both in the $80-$90 price range and I'm having no luck trying to figure out if there is any significant difference between how they would be in my setup. Or would I be better off looking at something else in the same price range? Thanks... for any replies. I'm frustrated and scratching my head at this point!

 

[pauldh]

The Radeon 9600 is a far better card than the FX5500. Matter of fact, a 128-bit Radeon 9550 is also much better than the FX5500, and it costs around $65. If you care to look up performance numbers in various games, <A HREF="http://www.ixbt-labs.com/articles2/over2k4/index.html#p11" target="_new">look here at this 101 card shootout</A> and click the game/setting you want to see.

To do better than the Radeon 9600, you have to up your budget to little over $100 for a Radeon 9600 Pro. It is a clear step ahead in performance over the plain 9600.

All of the above cards are DX9 cards. If you want decent performance on a real budget, and don't mind a DX8 card, a used GF4Ti4x00 would be a good choice in the under $50 range.

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[RoLLi]

Thanks for your suggestion Paul. I haven't kept up on hardware and I'm lagging behind on knowing what's good or bad. Looks like I'm gonna look for a 9600 Pro. If anyone else has anymore suggestions on what to throw in this setup, don't be afraid to let me know.

From what I'm reading... am I correct in saying that a 256 meg card really won't make much of a difference... I might as well go with a 128 meg card?

 

[Crashman]

If you can find a "new old stock" 9700 pro for a similar price, grab it up, otherwise the 9600 pro is fine.

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[pauldh]

256MB is starting to make a difference in better allowing the highest in-game settings. Doom 3 was basically the first "playable" instance I saw that 256MB helped a 9800 Pro play at high details a little better than the 128MB version. I say playable, because before that it only showed a difference at settings like 1600x1200 4X/8X where both cards were not powerful enough to remain playable anyway. Otherwise the 128MB version usually was even or a tick ahead of the 256MB version. But in this case, the 256MB version had DDR2, where the 128MB had DDR. So it wasn't just a double ram difference either.

But, the 9600 series of cards and lower isn't a powerful enough GPU to take advantage of the extra memory. So yes, you are correct that 256MB will do nothing for you. At some cranked up AA/AF settings, maybe the 256MB version would get 12 fps compared to the 128MB getting 9 fps. But at playable resolutions/settings, they will be equal. Also, often the more memory they put on a card, the cheaper the memory. So if you overclock, you may find the 128MB one can clock higher than the 256MB version.

I'd only worry about having 256MB of memory if you are buying a $300+ card. When on a budget, you put the money into a better GPU instead of spending it on a slower gpu with more memory. So many folks fall for the Big number's game in video Ram, not realizing they are buying slow or crippled cards with alot of ram.

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