help in choosing a video card please...

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I am currently building a system and I have everything almost all done except for the choosing of a video card. I think I may have narrowed it down to the:

Gigabyte Maya II GV-R9500 Pro
Asus GeForce FX-5600
Asus V9280S Ti4200
Asus V8460 Ultra Ti4600

My motherboard is the Asus P4PE with all the options(Gigabit LAN, SATA, RAID, Firewire, USB 2.0, ect.)

So if any of you out there can pick one of these cards for me and please tell me why you recommend it I would appreciate it.

Thank you
Dale
 
I'd go for the 9500pro for several reasons...

It's faster than the others in most test.
It's DX9, which none of the others are.
It can be turned into a 9700pro (unless I'm mistaken)
They can mostly be oc'ed quite a lot, which means even more speed...

Onto subjective reasons, I think that ATI's image quality is much better than nvidias (at least when you compare 9700pro to GF4 TI(insert number here)...

It's AA looks better, and takes less of a performance hit... The AF is on par with nvidias (if compared at best quality on both cards), and takes less performance hit...

The FX 5600 isn't too good... The image quality isn't very good, or rather, when the image quality is good, you don't get anywhere near the speed you'd expect...


For a review of the FX 5600 take a look here..

Here's a reveiw of the 9500pro, and here's another...

BTW: you should factor in a little speed increase from what you see in those reviews, as later drivers have had some performance increases... (At least true for ATI)

Hope this helps :)
 
If I were in your position, I would go for the 5600 or 9500 PRO, which are both DX9 cards might I add. At least the 5600 Ultra is, but I am almost 99% sure the 5600 is a DX9 card too. The 5600 has faster clocks and raw specs than the 9500 PRO which is why I would go for it.

Only some of the 9500 PRO cards can be turned into a 9700 PRO performance wise, which I think is a pretty large gamble to take if you ask me since the 9500 PRO is leveling with the GeForce 4 TI4600 in performance at its standard clocks and the 5600 is faster than the TI4600; so if you get my point...
 
The ATI Radeon 9500 is a good value for the money and it can be overclocked to match or surpass the 9700.

The main difference, though, is even with overclocking the 9700 has 256-bit memory where the 9500 only has 128-bit memory.

I had the 9500, but since the 9700 has dropped significantly in price with the release of the 9800 I went ahead and upgraded. Very happy with the fps I get with it.
 
Originally posted by timmoore
Only some of the 9500 PRO cards can be turned into a 9700 PRO performance wise, which I think is a pretty large gamble to take if you ask me

It was the 9500 non pro that could be softmodded to 9700 Pro as it was released on the same PCB as the 9700 and you could mod it to enable the 256bit bus.
I think all the more recent 9500/9500 pro cards are on a shorter and model specific PCB. So running one as a 9700 Pro isn't really an option here. But as timmoore points out the cards are proving to be very overclockable so with that in mind take a look at the stock DoomIII benchmarks from HardOCP...

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Source: HardOCP.com

This benchmark shows the 9500Pro up there with the 5600 Ultra in DoomIII. With the 9500 Pro being slightly cheaper than the 5600 non pro I would opt for that over the plain and possibly very LOUD FX 5600.
 
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