Radeon 8500 Retail or Gainward GeForce3 Ti200 128mb?

[ThatDumbGuy]

They are both around the same price at newegg. I know that a certain [ H ]ard core website OC'ed the gainward to ti500 levels, not sure how well the radeon OC's. Any thoughts or comments?

 

[A5]

I faced a similar decision today, and I went with the Gainward; just seems like the better buy IMO.

 

[Rand]

The Retail R8500 is faster at stock clockspeeds, and can usually o/c to 300/300 to 315/315. The GF3 Ti200 can usually hit at least regular GF3 speeds, and sometimes a bit above GF3 Ti500 speeds.

The R8500 though has HydraVision, TV-Out and DVI Out by default, better FSAA, better 2D visual quality usually, a slightly better 3D feature set, and better anisotropic filtering performance, along with a more powerful T&L engine.

The only real advantage I see for nVidia is better driver support, but ATi has improved significantly in that regard while nVidia seems to be slacking off somewhat.
I might consider a Ti500 as a viable alternative over the R8500 Retail, but definitely not the Ti200.

Just make sure you use the more recent beta drivers for the R8500, as the earlier drivers were much slower and had definite compatibility issues.

 

[murphy55d]

I'm not even that [ H ]ardcore and my Gainward Ti200 64MB overclocked big time.

Definitely go with the GF3.

 

[bocamojo]

IMO, the 8500 is a much better deal for the money... If I were in the market for an nvidia card, I'd wait for the GF4...

 

[jcmkk]

The 8500 hands down. The Radeon is faster than the GeForce 3 Ti 500. Don't give me that overclocking crap. The Radeon can overclock too. The 128MB of memory is useless. If you decide to go the Ti 200 route, go with the 64MB version and save a little cash.

 

[Leon]

<< The Radeon is faster than the GeForce 3 Ti 500 >>



In your little fantasy world. Anantech Benchmarks show different story.

Go with 64Mb TI200 and save some cash . Also, look at Hot Deal forum, they have nice deals on Radeon 8500 @ Best Buy, and Visiontek GF3 TI200 w/$50 rebate.

 

[lastig21]

I don't know about the 128meg version of the Ti200, but I know the 8500 definitely runs faster then the 64meg version at default clock speeds. The 3d picture looks great on either card. I would think price would be the main determining factor, but the dual display setup on the 8500 is really cool.

 

[Ryan]

Radeon, 2d quality is MUCH better 🙂 Plus, many more features 🙂

 

[PliotronX]

I'd go for the Radeon 8500 OEM and perform the pencil trick to get the voltages up to the retail 8500's level and OC that sucker to 300~315MHz.

 

[BFG10K]

Normally I'd recommend the Radeon 8500 but I'm currently using a Radeon 7000 and I'm not happy with the quality of the latest leaked drivers (these are the only ones that work with my board on Windows XP). I have a wide range of glitches such as blacked out Quake3 rocket explosions, Unreal ground flickering, problems switching resolutions in 3D games and problems increasing the brightness of dark games.

Also it turns out that the glitches I thought that nVidia's boards have also happen on ATi's cards too so in those situations it's the games, not the card.

In your little fantasy world. Anantech Benchmarks show different story.

I'm no ATi zealot but those beta drivers have known problems with performance because they've been tweaked for compatibility. ATi's next WHQL drivers should be much faster. Also look at some slightly older benchmarks done in RTCW and Giants and you'll see the Radeon 8500 edges the Ti500. Of couse that slight performance edge is not worth losing nVidia's superb drivers.