getting a new card, and have a few questions

My BFG TI-4200 burned out when my heatsink fan died, so I am thinking of going with a new Radeon something between a 9700-9800pro. What I am wondering is what is the best brand right now, for performance/overclockability. I'm probably not going to upgrade from this card for a while, so is there enough of a performance gain with the 9800pro to go for it. They are going for the lower 300's on E-Bay, which I think is where I am going to go, I always go for the claimed "new" products on there, I have been relatively safe so far. Any other opinions please tell me. Thanks for all the info guys.

Ir0nman

Personally, I upgraded to a 9800pro from a ti4200 aswell and it blew my pants off. I would reccomend the 9800pro if you are going to keep it for a long time due to the slight enchancements to the core that they did. As far as what brand to choose I believe the only one that differs from ati's refrence design is Hercules so your best bet is to go with whatever one comes with the better bundle/price. I went with the BBA (built by ati) 9800 pro and have had no problems whatsoever. As far as overclocking goes let me first say that no games out there now ran slow enough for me to warrant overclocking the card, however just for kicks I took it for a spin just to see what it could do and I could obtain 430mhz on the core and 710 on the memory and it passed a 24hr session of 3dmark2001 without error.

Get the 9800pro. Your going to see a huge difference.

sounds good, does anyome have a linky to some benchies on the 128 and 256 MB versions of the 9800 pro. I highly doubt I am going to affordthe 256 MB version, but I am simply curious how 128 more meg of memory affects performance. BTW thanks for the advice so far guys

well in todays current games the diffrence between the 256 and 128 is about 1-2% if any. However certain games like ut2003 are showing around a 5-10fps advantage on the 256mb card when running 4xAnti aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering in resolutions of 1280x1024 and above. As far as future games are concerned it's sort of hit or miss, as times have shown me that every time a card comes out with more ram it usually takes 6months to a year+ before games start really utilize it. For cost reasons I would get the 128mb version though.