Which ATI product to buy???

[Quixfire]

Hello,
I am trying to find a good deal on a Radeon 7500 64MB DDR video card for a friend.

Here is the problem, since ATI started selling chipsets to third party vendors, how do you pick a quality video card?

I would prefer a Retail ATI product (built by ATI), but they are very difficult to find a good deal on, i.e. around 100.00 with shipping.

Please help, links to benchmarks, personal experience, or a good deal on a ATI built card.

Thanks in Advance

 

[Rand]

<<

Here is the problem, since ATI started selling chipsets to third party vendors, how do you pick a quality video card?
>>



The quality of manufacture is going to be 100% identical pretty much irregardless of whom you purchase it from. ATi is still manufacturing the boards for the vast majority of the third party manufacturers.
So far as I'm ware Gigabyte is the only third party manufacturer actually producing their own Radeon products, the rest are simply manufactured by ATi and re-sold to the third party for remarking and resale.

Keep in mind most third party R7500's are clocked at 270/230 rather then the 290/230 of ATi's own board however, but given that the R7500 is primarily memory bandwidth limited it makes little real world difference at all.

 

[BFG10K]

If I was buying an ATi board I'd stick to a genuine ATi part because you never know what the third party manufacturers have skimped on.