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"Graphics Cards???"

Right, I seek some help.

Currently upgrading my PC and hope to play some decent games on it, DOOM 3, Far Cry, Half life 2 etc... Also don't really want to have to update it again soon (within a few years anyway)

So I ask for some recomendations, have been looking at the Sapphire Radeon 9800 pro and the 9600 XT.

But I have no idea what the performace of these cards are like with the games above and if the differences in price reflect the standard of the cards.

So anyone recommend which cards I should be looking at and which they think would be the best.
Willing to spend maybe around £200 Ex Vat

Cheers

Right, I seek some help.

Currently upgrading my PC and hope to play some decent games on it, DOOM 3, Far Cry, Half life 2 etc... Also don't really want to have to update it again soon (within a few years anyway)

So I ask for some recomendations, have been looking at the Sapphire Radeon 9800 pro and the 9600 XT.

But I have no idea what the performace of these cards are like with the games above and if the differences in price reflect the standard of the cards.

So anyone recommend which cards I should be looking at and which they think would be the best.
Willing to spend maybe around £200 Ex Vat

Cheers

Spend a little more and you could get an X800 Pro for around £240-280 Ex VAT.

Get the right model and you could clock it to XT speeds too.

As soon as budget allows, I'm getting me one :D

I am a bit of an ATI fan but i must admit the Geforce 6800 (standard) looks very tempting for around £200 but i would personally go for the 9800 pro (Get the 256bit one, don’t be coned with the 128bit), both of these cards will play doom on high. If I was you I would wait for Nvidia and ATI to release the new chipsets this will result is a decent price drop.

The Radeon 9600 Pro is a very decent card and can be found at some places under £100. Good performance all round, I can play Far Cry, Doom 3 and more recently Counter Strike: Source (Source being the graphics engine powering Half Life 2) with little to no problems.

What settings can you get out of Source? And is there any of those 'Error to Desktop' problems?

I can run everything in high detail and have yet to crash to the desktop once. I get the occasional slowdown, but I think that's more to do with the game still being in fairly early stages, and the physics engine that throws around tons of objects on screen at once.

If you're gonna get a 9600 or 9800 go for the 9800Pro. Its a far better card, and make sure you get the 256-bit memory version, as its a fair bit quicker.

If you can gfo a little higher I'd suggest you try and get your hands on a X800(and even the pro or XT if you can stretch that far, which I doubt), as it's more powerful than the Nvidia or the other ATI jobs.

I'd have gone for the radeon 9800 pro, but I bought my card last year when the 9800 was still pretty expensive. Now it can be found around the same price as my 9600 pro cost.

If you can manage £200 then get an Nvidia GeForce 6800 - they outperform the Radeon 9800 Pro by a considerable amount and give the best bang to buck ratio around.

I've had very few problems with my 9600XT. Cheap too.

Under £100.

But I recomend waiting 'til after Christmas and then buying a top of the range model for under £200...

See, I might be doing the same, it's when it's cheapest.