"V \"fnugen\"" > wrote in
:

> I had purchased a card unknowing it was an ATI partner card. Turns out
> it is an Alastor 9550 256m card. Well...........the damned thing never
> worked for more than 5 mins. It froze on at least 3 of my games. It even
> froze doing a benchmark on it. Went back to my built by ATI 9000 pro for
> now. I now have an almost $200 store credit to replace the card with.
> This would be CDN dollars. I am thinking either the 9600pro, 9600XT or
> the 9800pro, 9800XT. Other than the fact the 9800 will run me more
> money, are the differences too subtle for a more casual gamer to notice
> to warrant a bigger price tag??
Out of those cards 9800Pro is probably the best pick. Very good performance
and they keep popping out for 270-280 CDN here and there, older 9700Pro is
also a good pick if you can get it cheaper.

The main caveat is that if you plan to play OpenGL games (or if you need
OpenGL for any other purpose), you may be in trouble with those cards. For
OpenGL you'd need NVidia card, but right now it's a hard pick. The optimal
pick is probably 5900XT for 250-270 CDN. But soon they're supposed to
release 6600GT which is much faster than any of mentioned cards and is
supposed to retail for around 300 CDN (and no problems with OpenGL). They
actually already released PCI-E version, but you need AGP I suppose.
Probably it will also drop prices on other cards.

Alex.