Which manufacturer for videocard?

[Locke]

Question: Should the manufacturer of a videocard become a factor in buying one?


I was in Fry's today looking at the shiny new cards and wondered who the weird companys with non-fancy cover were.

Yeah their cheap but is the quality the same as a ATI made card?

(Specifically about this )

[shooraijin]

It's the same chip, but a number of the budget card manufacturers that use ATI chip sets (or, for that matter, those who use nVidia designs as well) may try to skimp by using an older GPU but overclocking the core and/or VRAM to generate higher performance. Sometimes this is successful (Sapphire has gotten away with this on a few ATI designs), sometimes it isn't.

What you need to find out is the actual GPU on the card you're planning to buy, and compare that with an equivalently spec'ed reference design. Look at core and memory speed, as well as throughput characteristics such as FSAA, number of pipelines, number of shaders, etc. At least with ATI and nVidia, the GPU is the GPU, and you can compare cards with the same GPU, looking only at any overclocking that may be going on.

Myself, I tend to prefer to buy reference designs from the manufacturer that came up with the design in the first place. Overclocking a video card works well if you can do it right, but not all budget card makers do (and of those that can, they don't always do it consistently).

[Locke]

Thanks Shoo, I went and bought a ATI made one yesterday.

Now I need to install it..