I'm looking for a new vid card for a computer I'm building. I have a few of them in mind. I'd really love it if any of you can recommend one of them. Here they are: 1. Sapphire Radeon 9200 Atlantis 128MB 2. GEFORCE FX 5200 128MB DDR 3. ATI Radeon 9000 PRO 128MB DDR Thanks
The only GeForce FX card worth the money is the 5900 or 5900 Ultra. The others are junk. The Radeon 9000 Pro is slightly slower than the 8500. I'm not sure on the 9200 Pro, but it just may be the rebadged version of the Radeon 8500. This isn't a bad thing, but the Radeon 9x00 lineup with DX9 support is the 9500's on up. I don't want to sound like I hate nVidia, but the GFFX 5600 has trouble standing up to the GeForce 4 Ti4200, and that's about what the Radeon 8500 is like performance wise, but usually a bit cheaper for the plain 8500. The 5200 is even slower. Unless you get one dirt cheap, I really wouldn't waste my money on one. The Radeon 9500's are being discontinued and seem to be running a little cheaper. Sapphire offers one 64MB version for $123USD at Newegg. If you can afford to spend a little more, that would be a good investment, since it has DX9 support. It's the non-Pro, but it's still a helluva bargin, running cheaper than many GF4 Ti4200's and not that much more than GFFX5200's. Pay about $13 more and a non-pro Radeon 9600 is running at $136---still cheaper than the 5600's, and blowing them away in performance. I could keep going, but I can tell you're not in the mood to spend gobs of money---and I know the feeling. That's my 2 cents.
The 3 cards I mentioned all cost less than $90, and that's why I picked them. Personally, I wanted to go with the Radeon 9000 Pro, but I won't bother if it doesn't have DX9 support. This kind of leaves me in a tight spot, since I don't want to spend more than $100 on a video card or I won't have much left for the AMD XP 3000 processor. I'm doing my shopping here.
What I suggest, is get a Barton 2500+. Youll save $175, and you can always overclock the Barton to at least 2.1ghz with a 200fsb, depending on your mobo and mem. But with the money you save, I think you'll be able to get a better video card with some quality PC3200 memory if you wish to. I think that'd be the best decision. You could take $65 from the $175 and put it on the Sapphire 9600 Pro. Which would leave you with $110 for memory, or your pocket. Even if you don't overclock, you'll get great performance out of that system.
Yup. Expanding on my previous post, I can speak from experience on this. Get the video card first, IMO. That will give you much better performance sooner than if you go with a new CPU. You might be able to save a bit if you wait anyway. Currently, the XP3200+ is not the best deal for price/performance-wise. I'm not saying don't do it, but just know it's not the best bang per buck.
