What made my purchase more expensive?

[Lespharae]

First of all, I don't know much about computers. But recently a friend started to bring up the graphics card topic again. We bought ours nearly at the same time, about a year ago. I got an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro on sale for $199, while he got a Sapphire Atlantis Radeon 9600 for a little bit over 100 dollars at the time. Here's the link to his card: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814102320
I'm wondering why the normal ATI Radeon 9800 Pro was much more expensive, I've constantly been told by older video gaming friends to go with the brand name (if I went ATI) instead of other companies such as Sapphire, etc. But I'm wondering: Why?

Thanks in advance,
Les.

 

[scottchen]

The brand to all honesty doesn't really matter, 9800pro can be found as cheap as 100 dollars, Sapphire makes ATI's cards anyways... so it doesn't really matter about the brand. The only difference is the warranty, and to overclockers, they tend to look for cards with lower nanosecond rated samsung ram.

 

[Unolocogringo]

Unless it is a typo, you are comparing the price of a 9600 to the price of a 9800 PRO model.
The 9800 PRO will kick the 9600's butt all day long. It is a much better card, and cost more.

I aint signing nothing!!!

 

[HardWareBoss]

Agreed

 

[Lespharae]

Hmm, so even if his card was 256mb (as a 9600), would mine be better? (9800 pro)

 

[Crashman]

You guys and your infatuation with RAM! Listen, when you make any comment listing the RAM of your video card first, everybody knows you're "hardware ignorant". RAM has very little affect on performance for most games because the lowest amount for good cards (128MB) is more than most games require to support all their features.

Because of that, a GeForce4 Ti4200-64MB is faster than a GeForce4 MX440 128MB, which is faster than a GeForce4 MX420-256MB. There's a situation where the card with the least RAM is the fastest, and the card with the most RAM is the slowest.

Performance is instead mostly based on what your graphics processor can do. Your 9800-Pro has 8 rendering pipelines and probably a 256-bit memory pathway (the wider pathway makes the memory transfers faster). His 9600 has 4 rendering pipelines and a 128-bit memory pathway. So your graphics chip is twice as powerfull, and your video memory has twice the performance.

He on the other hand has a weak, slow card, with lots of slow memory. This is about SPEED you know?

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[Lespharae]

Heh, I know I'm hardware ignorant, mainly because I dont know anything about this stuff. But that information was very helpful, Crashman, thanks.

One last question, how do you figure out how many rendering pipelines a graphics card has?<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Lespharae on 07/21/05 06:05 AM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[Crashman]

The manufacturer tells you information about the graphics processor. For the technically inclined, they even post images of the architecture.

I get tired of telling newbs that RAM is less important than rendering speed, even my dealer will happily sell you a low-end 256MB card for more money than a high end 128MB model.

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[Crashman]

BTW, I liked the pun. In case the rest of you didn't catch it, ignorant means uneducated and can be limitted to a single subject (I'm ignorant in the field of Astrology).

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[Bob369]

I dont know about how it is now. I havent bought a card directly from ATI, but my buddy has before and his came bundled with games. (HL1 I believe) That could be where you get part of the price difference between normal ATI cards and other brands such as Sapphire.

My PC:
Abit AX8 Socket 939 VIA K8T890
AMD Athlon 64 3200 Winchester
Sapphire Radeon X700 Pro 256 Mb PCIe
WD Raptor 37 Gb SATA
Corsair 2x512 PC3200 DDR Dual-Channel Platnium Edition