Best Bang For The Buck Under or just over $100

[SpicaTC50]

Hi all. I'm going to be building a PC for my daughter, the Wolfenstein addict.
What's the best ATI card for the money right now under $100. I've had a
Sapphire 8500LE that's been quite stable. Do they still make good products?
I see a Sapphire 9200 256meg for $69 at Newegg but have some input
that the way to go is with 9600 or higher which does strain the budget. Thanks
for any advice.

 

[Inglo]

Hi all. I'm going to be building a PC for my daughter, the Wolfenstein addict.
What's the best ATI card for the money right now under $100. I've had a
Sapphire 8500LE that's been quite stable. Do they still make good products?
I see a Sapphire 9200 256meg for $69 at Newegg but have some input
that the way to go is with 9600 or higher which does strain the budget. Thanks
for any advice.

I'll be selling my "Built By ATI" Radeon 9600 Pro for ~$100 really soon,
I'm not trying to sell it to you but if you look around at used cards
you'll find a lot of them out there on ebay or your local classifieds
for that price. Mine's in perfect shape, less than a year old, I just
want to get a 9800.
If you happen to live in Northern California let me know.

Besides all that I put a PowerColor Radeon 9200 256 Mb bought from
newegg.com for ~$90 that went into a pretty crappy old 933 MHz Celeron
that's doing a great job, plays RTCW great and does a decent job
handling newer games like Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow. Sapphire's
good too, these 9200s with 256 Mb is just a gimmick, the extra 128 Mb
does almost nothing. The main thing to check is that you're getting a
card that's memory bus is 128 bit rather than 64.

 

[boe]

I'd get the 9600 ultimate with the passive cooler from Sapphire w 128mb -
you will get little benefit from more memory with a slower processor. Take
a look on pricewatch.com for vendors and price - while it is about $150 it
is quiet fast and gives your the potential to play more demanding games with
greater detail as they become available.

 

[Martin Francis]

Hi all. I'm going to be building a PC for my daughter, the Wolfenstein addict.
What's the best ATI card for the money right now under $100. I've had a
Sapphire 8500LE that's been quite stable. Do they still make good products?
I see a Sapphire 9200 256meg for $69 at Newegg but have some input
that the way to go is with 9600 or higher which does strain the budget. Thanks
for any advice.

If you can find a reputable eBay seller it might be possible to get a fairly
high-end card for about $100- I got a 9700 for £70 (UK, about $130 US). Give
it a go- look out for the 9700s, 9500s (there is one type of 9500 that is
software moddable into a 9700), and 9600s.

OTOH, if she's just playing Wolfenstein (I assume not the early '90s one!)
why not find an old GF4 Ti?

 

[NightSky 421]

Hi all. I'm going to be building a PC for my daughter, the Wolfenstein addict.
What's the best ATI card for the money right now under $100. I've had a
Sapphire 8500LE that's been quite stable. Do they still make good products?
I see a Sapphire 9200 256meg for $69 at Newegg but have some input
that the way to go is with 9600 or higher which does strain the budget. Thanks
for any advice.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein should be just fine with a 9200 video card.
Try not to get the SE version, but even it would probably be fine. After
all, I originally ran RTCW on a Celeron 800 with a GeForce2 MX AGP and it
was pretty smooth (although not absolutely 100%) in 800x600x32 resolution.
But let me put things into perspective based on my own experience with
regards to video cards...

I just upgraded my second computer. It's now running an Athlon XP 2500+
processor on a Gigabyte GA-7N400-L motherboard and a pair of PC3200 CAS3
Kingston memory sticks (dual channel mode). On this machine, I have a
Radeon 9200SE 128MB AGP video card. My 3DMark2001SE score is 4216 at
default settings with this newly upgraded system with a fresh OS install
and updated drivers.

My big computer is a P4 2.8GHz system with a Gigabyte GA-8IPE1000 Pro
motherboard and 1GB of PC3200 CAS3 Kingston memory in dual channel mode as
well. Video card is a built-by-ATI Radeon 9800 Pro with 128MB. My
3DMark2001SE score on this system is 15,900...more than ten thousand
points higher!

My point is, although I did expect this type of a result, it says a lot
about the gap in performance between video cards. I can draw this
comparison largely because the performance difference between the
processors on my two systems isn't very wide now.

 

[Augustus]

Hi all. I'm going to be building a PC for my daughter, the Wolfenstein addict.
What's the best ATI card for the money right now under $100. I've had a
Sapphire 8500LE that's been quite stable. Do they still make good products?
I see a Sapphire 9200 256meg for $69 at Newegg but have some input
that the way to go is with 9600 or higher which does strain the budget. Thanks
for any advice.

Don't get a 9200 card of any kind. It's a DX 8.1 card, RV280 core with
AGP8X support, but 4 pipelines with one TMU per pipe and even slower memory
than your 8500LE. The 9200 Pro has the same core and memory speed. Your
existing 8500 has 4 pipelines with 2 TMU per pipe. Seeing as how a full bore
8500 can't fill the AGP4X bandwidth, AGP8X compatibility is pointless.
It'll be outperformed by your 8500LE. Best value is to pick up a 9600 Pro,
which is DX9 and considerably faster memory and core. Avoid the
9600SE....that's a step down in speed with DX9 support.

 

[Augustus]

Hi all. I'm going to be building a PC for my daughter, the Wolfenstein addict.
What's the best ATI card for the money right now under $100. I've had a
Sapphire 8500LE that's been quite stable. Do they still make good products?
I see a Sapphire 9200 256meg for $69 at Newegg but have some input
that the way to go is with 9600 or higher which does strain the budget. Thanks
for any advice.

Don't get a 9200 card of any kind. It's a DX 8.1 card, RV280 core with
AGP8X support, but 4 pipelines with one TMU per pipe and even slower memory
than your 8500LE. The 9200 Pro has the same core and memory speed. Your
existing 8500 has 4 pipelines with 2 TMU per pipe. Seeing as how a full bore
8500 can't fill the AGP4X bandwidth, AGP8X compatibility is pointless.
It'll be outperformed by your 8500LE. Best value is to pick up a 9600 Pro,
which is DX9 and considerably faster memory and core. Avoid the
9600SE....that's a step down in speed with DX9 support.

 

[Mark]

You wrote in thusly:

I just upgraded my second computer. It's now running an Athlon XP
2500+ processor on a Gigabyte GA-7N400-L motherboard and a pair of
PC3200 CAS3 Kingston memory sticks (dual channel mode). On this
machine, I have a Radeon 9200SE 128MB AGP video card. My 3DMark2001SE
score is 4216 at default settings with this newly upgraded system with
a fresh OS install and updated drivers.

My big computer is a P4 2.8GHz system with a Gigabyte GA-8IPE1000 Pro
motherboard and 1GB of PC3200 CAS3 Kingston memory in dual channel
mode as well. Video card is a built-by-ATI Radeon 9800 Pro with
128MB. My 3DMark2001SE score on this system is 15,900...more than ten
thousand points higher!

My point is, although I did expect this type of a result, it says a
lot about the gap in performance between video cards. I can draw this
comparison largely because the performance difference between the
processors on my two systems isn't very wide now.

The difference might be because the AMD 2500+ has a operating frequency
of 1.83GHz, compared to your 2.8GHz "big computer". That's a ~1GHz
difference between the processors.

 

[SpicaTC50]

Thanks for the responses. I've decided on a few things after spending the
weekend re-educating myself on all this stuff. I'm going with at least a
non-SE 9600 but haven't decided on standard or Pro while the Ultimate is
definately out of range. It might be to my advantage to keep the new PC and
vid card and give my daughter my Athlon XP 1600/8500LE with 512 non-DDR
memory only because I will be working from home often on a network
administering Active Directory when we deploy it later on this year, and from
the fact that my son and daughter will still want to play games on my system
since I have a great looking Compaq Q-Vision 210 21" monitor which certainly
adds to the effect compared to 17" monitors. Your input was certainly
appreciated.

 

[NightSky 421]

The difference might be because the AMD 2500+ has a operating frequency
of 1.83GHz, compared to your 2.8GHz "big computer". That's a ~1GHz
difference between the processors.

That's true, but AMD and Intel engineered their processors differently.
This is why AMD went with the Pentium rating system (i.e. 2500+).

 

[Mark]

You wrote in thusly:

That's true, but AMD and Intel engineered their processors
differently. This is why AMD went with the Pentium rating system (i.e.
2500+).

Wouldn't that then be the 1.83GHz rating? That's what the actual clock
frequency is and that's the rating I thought was used by Intel. It would
be interesting to see just what makes up that difference.

One way that I can think of to take the video cards far out of the
equation would be to use a low resolution. That leaves the CPUs to do
all the calculations for such things as physics, AI and many other
things.

Perhaps knowing that difference, also helps to know what kind of role
the video cards actually play towards the scores.