Oh the incompetence

[andrewducker]

Lilian wants a new graphics card - so I spent some time trying to track something down that fitted her budget (around £90).

I first spent some time trying to find somewhere that would give me a simple answer as to which cards were better, failed miserably and ended up comparing almost-certainly-incomparable results from 4 different sites before going down to the local shop to see what they had in.

I then discovered that they were out of anything AGP based in the price range I was looking at (they had cards for £50 and for £250, neither of which were even vaguely useful), before coming back, discovering that the assistant had been completely wrong when he told me there was an AGP variant of the card he'd recommended, and buying an ATI 9600-Pro online.

There really, really ought to be an easier way of doing this. If I wasn't a geek then I'd have been completely fucked.

Comments

[mb2u]

Welcome to the wonderful world of retail electronics...I've pretty much given up on going to Best Buy or CompUSA and getting an inteligent answer. If I really need parts, either I order them oniline and hope or go to one of the few specialist shops left here and ask the geek of questionable hygene...

[derumi.livejournal.com]

Why did you go with ATI instead of nVidia?

[andrewducker]

Because the equivalent for NVidia was the 6600 - which I could only find in PCI-Express. Various people had recommended the 9600 Pro to me, so I decided to go with that - especially as the reviews seemed to show ATI slightly out in front.

[derumi.livejournal.com]

My main problem with ATI is that it seems that some of the features the reviewers like that its competitors don't have, aren't being utilized by the gaming industry. It also seems to be more expensive compared to the comparable (wtf? okay, leaving that phrase in because it's funny - am awake now) in comparison to similar products (ATI 7000 vs a GeF4).

I guess it's not as much a concern nowadays, but I try to get video cards that are the "game industry standard" - the S3 early on, the Voodoo3 when it reigned, the GeForce series since then. I've been looking to upgrade to an nVidia FX card because that seems to be the way to go based on what games are supporting now and other industry news (dire warnings of ATI's "demise", etc). Years of selling video games to people that can't play them on their machines are basically what I keep in mind when it comes to shopping for graphics processors. Of course, in the interest of competition and products getting better, I like seeing both ATI and nVidia doing well.

[andrewducker]

Aaah - one of the reasons for going ATI is that HL2 apparently runs better on ATIs than on nVidia...

[dreema.livejournal.com]

Well no, if you weren't a geek, you'd have gone down to pc world and ended up walking out with a nice shiny new packard bell instead of what you actually wanted ;)