Today there was a sale @ Fry's for a Radeon 9800 Non-Pro that came w/ a voucher for HL2 via download for $199.99! They're probably sold out now though. I would've gotten this, but I was already planning on getting the PRO version b/c of the mods you can do to it and it is an extremely fast card.
That deal would have been good, plus you can turn the 9800 non-pro intro a pro if it has the right memory, or just oc it to pro speeds if it has the fastest memory. Believe me, the 9800 non-pro is very fast too. It's actually a lot faster than the 9600 Pro.
Welp...too late now...and anyways it was an ATi model, not a Sapphire or powercolor, and I doubt to the utmost that it had those forsaken Samsung 3.3ns memory chips on it, as ATI is smart enough to hunt down people who mod their cards, as they discontinued to 9500 series, and I wouldn't be suprised if they discontinue the 9800 Pro, as they discontinued the Non-Pro. Plus to justify my point, it most definitely does not have the chips b/c 1)the product was discontinued2)it comes w/ hl2, obviously a newer version...wait, um..like if I open the card and it doesn't have the Samsung chips can I return it? B/c if its on sale...awesome!
Well that's not necessarily true. The Built By Ati 9600 Pro that I have has Samsung 2.8ns memory on it. Also, the reason they're discontinuating 9800 models is because there's just to much of them. At one time there were 5 versions of the 9800 cards. the gap between the non-pro and the pro was too small so nobody bought the pro. But now that the non-pro is hardily available, and that the 9800XT is on the market, the gap got bigger and I'm almost sure that those cards sell better than the 9800 Pro(when it came out), even though it costs so much. You can always try to return it, although I don't personnally encourage this kind of behavior, because it hurts those who wants to return their product for legitimate reasons.
