ATI vs Sapphire vs PowerColor vs etc

[Kevin]

Hi there,

I've been out of the computer market for awhile now. What's with all
these other companies carrying ATI products. For example, I can get a
Sapphire Radeon 9600 or a PowerColor 9600 and ATI still has their own
9600. I am seeing these supposedly same products at different prices.

What is the difference between the companies and which one would you
recommend I get? I am not a gamer. I may do some light video editing
though. Thanks for the help. Kindly appreciated.

 

[Kevin C.]

Hi there,

I've been out of the computer market for awhile now. What's with all
these other companies carrying ATI products. For example, I can get a
Sapphire Radeon 9600 or a PowerColor 9600 and ATI still has their own
9600. I am seeing these supposedly same products at different prices.

What is the difference between the companies and which one would you
recommend I get? I am not a gamer. I may do some light video editing
though. Thanks for the help. Kindly appreciated.

There are chip manufacturers (ATI/NVIDIA) and card manufacturers
(PowerColor, Sapphire, Visiontek, Hercules, etc.)

Generally speaking, cards with the same chipset will deliver roughly the
same performance. What you should really look for is the level of
warranty/support that the manufacturer provides, and if these appear to be
the same as well, then look for the software bundles that the cards come
with to determine which one is more valuable or better suited to you. For
obvious reasons, the ATI branded cards are considered to be something of a
standard, though it's possible to get better deals than that without
sacrificing the overall quality. For one thing, as far as I can tell, ATI
branded cards don't ship with any software bundles. For the same price or
less you can get the MSI brand Radeons which come with huge software
bundles. MSI is my personal recommendation, but they are not necessarily
heads and shoulders above the rest, so check things out for yourself.

Btw, video editing is a CPU-limited application. It has very little to do
with the graphics power of a video card unless by "video editing" you mean
"rendering CG". If you mean simply cutting mpegs and that sort of thing, you
will get little benefit from a high-end graphics card.