As competition between videocard manufactures and the ability to use as many squares on a DIE as possible, there has been made a lot of different deriviates of the basic videochips. I think to some point that it s.... cause we as customers has to know the difference of GT, Ultra, MX, LE, SE, XT and so on....
There are different memory types: 64bit, 128bit & 256bit - and there are models with 4 pipelines that can be XTended to 8 pipelines and so on..............
No wonder that someone (including myself :disgust: gets ´busted´ sometimes.
My last nVidia was a FX5200 (up from a MX420 which REALLY sucked!). What they didn´t tell me in the shop was that there was a 64bit and a 128bit memory system FX5200 - and of cause mine was a 64bit!
(Busted!)
Not long ago (being on a tight budget) I decided to buy a Club3D 9600Pro, and what a relief

This was in basically all of my aplications 2-4 times faster than the FX5200!!
I learned the following:
Shops want to earn MONEY (selling cards without telling the whole truth), factories want to earn MONEY (they ARE telling the truth though), and I want to spare MONEY (THATS TRUTH TOO

I started to READ, READ and READ a lot of different articles in magazines and on the net, before I went bying a 9600Pro - and it actually plays DoomIII ok too
But what about all of those who just want a FAIR deal for their money, without reading until 5 o´clock for a few nights or so?
Well, it´s here Anandtech and other good testing sites come in to play - Shout it out and READ, READ, READ - also the small print on the new flashy videocard box, that sometimes tells more of the truth than the salesman in the shop.........
(Besides: My 9600Pro gets around 3.6K in 3DMark03 @ GPU:425 MEM:451 - is that OK....?)