goodbye GF3Ti200! hello Radeon 9500/9600 PRO

i'm an unfortunate dude living in bangladesh, have a lil fortune to buy a new graphics card. as my budget is limited & so is the available products in the market! so limited that there's only one shop who sell AMD processors!!

anywayz... i've the following options: Radeon 9500 PRO, Radeon 9600 PRO, GF4 Ti4800 or a GF4 Ti200 8X. it all depends on the availability & the pricing. i'd obviously go for the Radeon 9500 PRO, but if its not available or within my reach, what should i go for? 9600?

would i get any difference in the image quality or performance of Windows using the new card? plus what are these Omega drivers?

Been an NVidia man for a long time... so any disappointments I might face? I've heard that Radeon cards have problems with some games! is that true or just BS?

SafirXP said:

i'm an unfortunate dude living in bangladesh, have a lil fortune to buy a new graphics card. as my budget is limited & so is the available products in the market! so limited that there's only one shop who sell AMD processors!!

anywayz... i've the following options: Radeon 9500 PRO, Radeon 9600 PRO, GF4 Ti4800 or a GF4 Ti200 8X. it all depends on the availability & the pricing. i'd obviously go for the Radeon 9500 PRO, but if its not available or within my reach, what should i go for? 9600?

would i get any difference in the image quality or performance of Windows using the new card? plus what are these Omega drivers?

Been an NVidia man for a long time... so any disappointments I might face? I've heard that Radeon cards have problems with some games! is that true or just BS?

Click to expand...

BS ATI cards are fine should have no prob, Omega drivers are excellent. Get the 9600 Pro out of your choices or if possible a 9500 non pro from Sapphire and hopefully you get lucky with soft mod, otherwise for safe bet the 9600 and if you can stretch the 9500 pro

cisco kid

My old card was a GF3 ti200 and my new one is a 9500pro. I use to think my GF3 ran good in games untill I played planetside. I had to have all my setting on low for it to run smooth. I put the 9500pro in and turned on all the eyecandy and damn its like a totally diffrent looking game. Also video's and stuff run alot better and smoother. At first I bought a 9600pro and used it for 2 days.. untill I saw a 9500pro in a store and x-changed it (just for the fact everyone said the 9500pro was alot better). To tell you the truth I did not see that much diffrence in the 9500pro and 9600pro when playing games. It was only for 2 days I used it, and I know on benchmarks the 9600pro does not do that well. But it I never found the 9500pro and kept the 9600pro I would still have been happy with the diffrence over my GF3.

I had an ti200 OCed to ti500 spec..
I just upgraded to a Radeon 9500 non pro made by Sappire, and the soft mod was a sucess, it now has 8 pipelines open @ 256bit bus and OCed to 326/310(620) basically it runs as a 9700pro. If possible give the 9500np by saphire a try. If the soft Mod does not work you will still have a very nice new card.

I'll say the same thing I said in another tread about the 9500np. It may have just been my misfotune, but my 9500 decided it didn't want to work right after one day of having it installed. I didn't overclock it, I didn't do the mod (though that is why I bought it) so I am kind of frightened to buy another 9500np. I bought the 9600 Pro and I love the dang thing. If you could find a 9500 Pro I'd buy it, get the 9600 Pro. don't buy a card expecting to get good performance from an iffy procedure. there are some people that got the softmod to work but there are a lot that didn't. That is why ATI sold the 9500's as 9500's and not 9700's. They were rated to only have 4 pipelines in full working order. If their 8 pipelines all were in full working order, the odds are they are in a 9700 box right now. Every once in a while you'll find one that works, but it's rare especially now that it's leaked all over the web. I don't think ATI is stupid enough to keep selling a card for roughly 150 bux that can be made work 350 bux. That's just my opinion though...

9500 pro if you got the money. If I was you I wouldn't try the 9500 non pro soft mod. I wouldn't think it would be worth the hastle. And even if it does "work" it most likely will have some probs. A lot of people have found out that the mod works and they don't have checkers, but after a few hours of gaming they find out some things look weird. Such as one guy I was reading about couldn't see any water in a game.. I don't know which.

I think its sad you don't have anything better to put in your sig than what you have SafirXP.

Good luck in your final decision.

I used to think that the 9500 Pro was a better bargain untill I overclocked my 9600 Pro a significant amount today. Before I took it to 435MHz core or so. I took it all the way to 500MHz today and took the Memory up to 350MHz. It's running great. It beats the poo out of the 9500 Pro benchie's I've seen. I'm quite happy.