Radeon 9700 Pro or 9800 Pro?

[DragonSword]

This Christmas I was planning on going for the 9700 Pro but I recently decided to make the big leap to the 9800 pro. I want a card that will last a resonable amount of time but mainly, be a huge upgrade. Will I notice a pretty substantical performance gain when upgrading to this? Will my friend with a GeForce 4, ti4200, get jealous? My neighbor recently bought the Geforce 4 FX 5950 Ultra and me and him like to sort of compete on computer hardware. But he's a man with a job behind him, and Im only 15, so sometimes it's hard to keep up. But now I'm planning to give him a nice, sweet, christmas when I ask him to come over to my house on Christmas.

A worry of mine however, is that my cpu is currently an Athlon Xp 1800. Will this bottleneck my Radeon 9800 pro? I wont get a new cpu until next year around August; when I do, it'll be an Athlon Xp 2500, maybe greater then.

Another thing I'm sort of stuck on is that, since this costs 300 bucks, it would basically be my only Christmas present from my parents; however, if I get the Radeon 9700 Pro, I would still have some money for a movie or something. Hmmm..

 

[Mercurien]

With a 9800 Pro, the Athlon 1800 would be the bottleneck. Save $100 by getting a 9700 pro and get an Athlon 2500 with the difference.

 

[magomago]

Upgrade to a 2500+ NEXT August? Wow...

Uh 9800NP + 2500

 

[Corporate Thug]

i would try to find a 9800 np for $199 and use whatever extra money for a 2500+

 

[Brian48]

Personally speaking, I'd take the 9700Pro over the 9800np. In every test I've seen, the 9700Pro is slightly faster than the 9800np, albeit not by much. Supposedly overclocking potential is better with the 9800np, but I haven't seen any hard evidence of this and depending on the individual specimens, the potential can be there both either card. Of course, if you're not overclocking, this is a moot point.

The 9800Pro is markedly faster than the 9700Pro, but it's really only noticable in benchmarks. Existing games will fly on either card. The ONLY exception I've noticed is HALO, which does seem to run a little better with the more powerful card. Then again, I really think this is more of an issue of this game being a bad console port than anything else.

FYI, I happen to own a 9800Pro, 9700Pro, and 9700np. I did own a 9500Pro briefly, but sold that off after one month because I no longer needed it. All of the fore mentioned cards would serve you well for quite a long time. ATI really got it right this time when they developed the R300 core.