I wish I'd known this info. I threw away a 9800 because I thought it was a dinosaur after I got a fx5600.

Thought so. The 9800 series is no slouch in its day, and still could be used as a lower mid range board.

-S

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You downgraded big time man! :o look at the scores above - the 9800 is beating the 5950 and you have a slower board than that!

-S

Hrr, Weird, My X1600 can run pretty much any game I throw at it at the moment (Not everything on max graphics, but not on "Very Low" either)

I have thought about upgrading it (Along with my 1gig RAM) though, It is pretty old

Your x1600 is not a bad board and still works. Keep it. Use it in a second system if need be. I still have a 9600 XT in operation in this house even, in a mini system. Works great!

-S

'course I'll keep it

Funny, I also still have my old 9600 XT in my other, disconnected computer (Which is, frankly, useless, the motherboard uses RDRAM...), wonder if it still works though

My 9600 still works! Wife uses it mainly. For the occasional simple game and Outlook, Word, that kind of thing.

The 9600 XT was a gret line in its time. Pushing up near the 9800's yet at a budget price.

We will have a budget card from ATI soon that performs as well against the top of the lines in the name of the 4850. The 4850 is pushing impressive numbers at a $200 price tag. This may be the true crown to take over the crown from the earlier 9600 class finially. Every card ATI has made that is their budget line prior to the 4850 didn't perform half as well as its top end boards. Last time the budget line performed like the top end boards was the 9600. The 4850 will be a great upgrade path for ya! Cheap and fast. What else you want? :D I will probably be buying one or two 4850's to replace my x1900 XTX as my upgrade path. The 4870 will be expensive and I can crossfire 2 4850's for way less money and get the same or better performance.

I spent $600 on my x1900 XTX. Tired of paying that kind of money when I can do equal perf for less $$$.

-S

Check out what this 4850 is doing for a $200 Price tag:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...0,1957-12.html

Wow!

-S

Conclusion

Despite this botched launch, where the Radeon HD 4850 was available even before the press had information about it and the 4870 is still not available, there’s no denying that the 4850 is a very good card. Its performance is only 19% below the GeForce 260 GTX’ and is overall on a par with the GeForce 9800 GTX +, while beating out the 3870 X2! Note that those figures are influenced by the slight factory overclocking of the Asus model tested for this article, but on the other hand they’re adversely affected by the absence of Race Driver: GRID due to the problems we had with our sample card.


Still, the 4850 is already available at a price even lower than expected: $200! Nvidia should be the first to be surprised by that, while their decision to send us a GeForce 9800 GTX + a month before its availability (thus causing a big drop in the GeForce 9800 GTX’ price with some stores are starting to offer it for $199 ), won’t be enough. The GeForce 9800 GTX +, though not uninteresting (since it uses Nvidia’s first 55 µm GPU, with a frequency increased by 9% and a slight drop in power consumption and temperature), only represents a slight improvement in performance compared to the 9800 GTX and it costs more (it’s expected to retail in the neighborhood of $230, with the 9800 GTX’ price dropping a little more in the meantime), and above all it’s not yet available. As of now, in any event, it doesn’t seem to be worth the additional wait, prior to publication of our results of the high-end Radeon HD 4870.


AMD Radeon HD 4850
A too-hasty launch, but a card with a red-hot performance/price ratio despite its use of a reworked architecture, now optimized and extremely effective at this price level. Despite its advance in presenting the GeForce 9800 GTX +, Nvidia has been bested for performance/price ratio and at this price level.


+ AWARD: The Tom’s Hardware Recommended Buy Award, given to a product that provides the best bang for the buck.

Wow, I'll definatly look out for that one

Figured you'd might - Tom's recommends it big time!

-S

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