I replaced a clients Ti4600 with a Radeon 9600Pro (the Ti4600 died just
after a year!) for allot less then the cost of the Ti4600 new and still less
after all this time.

Client reports back that the 9600p seems faster, feels smoother and looks
better in 3D. They are very happy with the switch. Apparently it 'benches'
less then it actually performs in the real world.

Cost of the 9600p was under $150 including S/H.

System is an XP2000+ on a VIA KT333 board with 512Mb DDR running WinXP Home.

I battled with a wide variety of NF2 boards and all were disappointing in
the end although I did get nice performance with them and a damn good
overclock. My current Intel based machine is a league or two beyond the
AMD/NForce2 stuff. Basically nVidia couldn't get a consistent yield of chips
and didn't get there ducks in line with the motherboard makers, leading to
lots of unhappy buyers.

I was happier with the nVidia of yesterday.


My two cents.



"Steven C (Doktersteve)" wrote in message
news:T388b.115651$kW.28901@edtnps84...
And please dont get me wrong, i really dont want to upset the people in
this
group after they spent so much time helping me with some issues i have had
in the past week with my hardware, and giving me some good info on radeon
cards.

i dont think that the current "scandal" with nvidia will kill that
company,
and i think that nvidia saw this coming a mile away... it seems that
nvidia
has done quite alot of diversification in the past, making chipsets for
the
xbox, making motherboard chipsets, etc... it seems as though somewhere
down
the line they said "enough with this high end gaming business, we can make
far more money by pandering to the middle range consumer". and that is
what
they did.

Its like 3dfx and nvidia years ago.
3dfx decided to go after a certain market, while nvidia catered to a high
end market. in this case, you could compare call it nvidia going for that
middle range market and ati going for the high end.
The problem that 3dfx had was releasing way to many cards at the same time
in a desperate attempt to regain market share... a problem that nvidia
doesnt have.

years ago ati wasnt a contender for high end, then the radeon 7500 and
8500's changed all that, and nvidia was faced with competetion for the
first
time ever.

If this is the result (these bad benchmarks with HL2) of nvidia having
competetion, then it marks a turning point for the company, and hopefully
they can stop and change direction and gt back on track, just like 3dfx
was
NOT able to do.

Still, this doesnt spell out the end for nvidia. If they have cards that
cost less, and which run games, that is what about 80% of the market will
tolerate.
Admit it... 8/10 gamers could care less about what we here care about, and
that mass market is what keeps hardware and software companies in
business.
It costs less to make Geforce4 cards than the new 5900 cards, and if
nvidia
sold enough geforce4 cards to still turn a huge profit, they would never
complain.

they got themselves in trouble with behcnmarks, they should have shut up
about 3dmark, and i am sort of grinning at my own decision to get a 9600
pro
card now, but i dont want nvidia to die.

in fact, no one here should want nvidia to die.
Why did ati become so good in the 3d game? it was because they were trying
to compete with nvidia.
if one company has a monopoly for a market, its never a good thing.

still, i dont think nvidia is dying by any means, they are just at a point
where they have to decide if they want to go mass market only, or
seriously
work on making great cards, and ignoring little squabbles like whether or
not someone optomizes cards for benchmarking.

thats my opinion. worth what you paid for it btw ;-)

thanks for reading.