[Retsof]

Okay, as some of you may know, I have been browsing for a new rig.  But I have noticed that pretty much all of them come with ATI graphics cards.  Now, it seems like ATIs are plagued with bugs.  So are new ones less buggy, should I just get it and live with it, or should I buy a replacement as soon as I get it?

[Droid803]

why would you buy anything that comes with anything?
look for good parts yourself and put it together yourself~ (like a real man!)

unless you're getting a laptop in which case i would not advise trying to pull out the graphics card.

[Nuke]

i mostly stick with nvidia because i understand their naming conventions and they supposedly have better opengl support. but if you want general performance what you should do is look at a recent video card review (or rather several of them) and look at the benchmarks and see what card does the most (that you can afford).

also if youre gonna buy a system you might be better off getting a computer that just has onboard graphics, and drop in the graphics card of your choice. just be sure it has a slot for one. oems like to do things like put in mobos that havent had slot connectors installed because it saved the contracted mobo manufacturer 2 cents per unit. i avoid this by rolling my own, computer that is.

[Mika]

why would you buy anything that comes with anything?
look for good parts yourself and put it together yourself~ (like a real man!)

unless you're getting a laptop in which case i would not advise trying to pull out the graphics card.

I hope this was sarcasm.

I used to think this way earlier. Nowadays, I have come to a realization that I find computer building one of the least intriguing things that I can imagine doing, and also on top of that it is quite sensitive for small errors. Due to large amount of frustration, repetition, restarts, heat shutdowns, burned DIMM and a half smoking motherboard and some financial loss (burning DIMMs and the motherboard wasn't even my own doing due to the fractured arm at that time!), I realized this is one of the things I exactly want to outsource to somebody else.

After this enlightenment, I only cherry pick the components myself, the rest they can assemble in the shop, and they carry the responsibility of f***ed up thermal paste or misaligned DIMMs or incompatibility between components. Really, not my problem, I'm paying for a working system! After spending 1000 € on the equipment, the 50 € installation is pretty cheap and gives some kind of warranty and it being somebody else's fault and thus refundable , a detail which is not to be overlooked. I wouldn't hesitate a moment to pay a computer shop 50 € for all the assembly and installation stuff, it is really not something I want to do myself. I can, but I just don't want to, and this is where trading money for services becomes great.

I am the worst kind of customer, aren't I?

EDIT: seems to be one of 'em typo days

[Bobboau]

well, if you are willing to pay twice the price and get a bunch of ****ware insulated to save yourself two hours of work then by all means...

[Kszyhu]

There are shops where you can order parts and have them assembled for (far) less than twice the price of the components. And if the end result can be called 'a bunch of ****ware', there is fair possibility of it being your fault.

[Mika]

Back to ATI vs Nvidia, I tend to think they are equally ****ed or great, depending on how you look at it. Rest assured this NVidia hasn't been without its problems, like missing textures etc. that they fix up a couple of months later with driver updates. It is kind of a grass is greener on the other side sort of thing. Having used ATI and Nvidia for about 15 years, I don't find either of them have really a lot of to complain about. You'll always find the people that are not contempt at something being louder than the majority that is contempt with what they have.

What is more important, is thinking how long do you plan using the card. Will it be 6 months and then replace it for something better (and try to get some amount of money back), or will it be more like "I'll go down with this thing even if it kills me!" and use it for the next five to ten years. If going for the Hi-Fi route, you tend to lose more money, but you get the latest stuff - which might be disappointing given the price and such a short upgrade interval. If you go with the five year route, I don't recommend buying the latest or the best card. Buy instead a card from the best quarter that has already been beta tested by the early adopters, and you'll find you saved some good amount of money, grief, and still got a reasonable performance for a foreseeable future especially now that the consoles are slowing down the graphics requirements.

What it comes to shop assembled computers, I never choose brand computers, but only the parts that I want in my computer. The shops here assemble computers from the components and install all the necessary software to start it up to Windows and charge about 50€ for that job, which takes more than two hours if I did the same, hell even installing Windows 7 with the drivers seemed like an eternity. The thing is, I could have a relaxing massage for about 40 € that lasts for one hour, so this gives a perspective. And also this: the company I work in charges way more than 50€ of a single hour of my time - don't worry, I don't see much of that money myself. But I have never found bloated stuff in brand less computers, and I pretty much got all the software and exactly the software installed that I wanted in the first place.

[Ghostavo]

To answer the thread starter, I assume you have an old prejudice against ATI/AMD cards, but since some generation ago (say... x3000) that prejudice doesn't make any sense. AMD cards have since then been best in performance/price and haven't been buggy enough (at least by comparison with the competition's) to warrant any kind of worries.

[Nuke]

why would you buy anything that comes with anything?
look for good parts yourself and put it together yourself~ (like a real man!)

unless you're getting a laptop in which case i would not advise trying to pull out the graphics card.

I hope this was sarcasm.

I used to think this way earlier. Nowadays, I have come to a realization that I find computer building one of the least intriguing things that I can imagine doing, and also on top of that it is quite sensitive for small errors. Due to large amount of frustration, repetition, restarts, heat shutdowns, burned DIMM and a half smoking motherboard and some financial loss (burning DIMMs and the motherboard wasn't even my own doing due to the fractured arm at that time!), I realized this is one of the things I exactly want to outsource to somebody else.

After this enlightenment, I only cherry the components myself, the rest they can assemble in the shop, and they carry the responsibility of f***ed up thermal paste or misaligned DIMMs or incompatibility between components. Really, not my problem, I'm paying for a working system! After spending 1000 € on the equipment, the 50 € installation is pretty cheap and gives some kind of warranty and it being somebody else's fault and thus refundable , a detail which is not to be overlooked. I wouldn't hesitate a moment to pay a computer shop 50 € for all the assembly and installation stuff, it is really not something I want to do myself. I can, but I just don't want to, and this is where trading money for services becomes great.

I am the worst kind of customer, aren't I?

i did this once. it actually turned out to be a fairly nice rig. its what i played fs2 on when it came out. of course this was back in the day when system builders were professionals making big bucks, instead of the screw monkeys they are today. but soon i got a job in the system building profession and got a chance to see some of the shenanigans that go on. people dropping hard drives and installing them without any further testing, people not wearing their esd wristbands, general asshatery, that time i boned the receptionist behind that pile of computer cases. sometimes the boss decided to bring in people who never built a computer before (like the janitor, or the whore receptionist) just to meat a quota. and we would routinely ship machines that failed burn in tests. on top of that most of the people came into work stoned most of the time. granted it was a fun job but i dont ever want to buy one of their rigs.

after that experience i decided that i could do a better job on my own. ive built hundreds if not thousands of machines and usually they run fine. i didnt have any problems till i started buying top notch bleeding edge hardware. its better to aim for upper mid range because thats where the most stable hardware is. parts are cheap and lightweight, you dont need a monster of a psu to run it, you dont need a case that looks like a server, it doesn't need to sound like a jet engine. you can move it around and take it to lan parties without fear of it breaking.  and you are generally left with a far more pleasant computer.

so far ive had 2 main problems with high end hardware. ive had a lot of trouble with high performance ram. usually because the factory specification called for it to be overclocked. i generally dont like to overclock, i kind of think that clock specifications exist for a reason. but when the factory says its ok i guess its fine, of course when you try to overclock it you get all kinds of memory errors, you tweak the timing to the factory spec and it still dont want to run stable, and you end up running it at a lower clock. this is mostly just a matter of product misrepresentation. when i buy 1066 ram, i expect that i can run at 1066 without overclocking it, and when i find that it doesnt i tend to get pissed off. i think i ended up running it at 800 because of this, which was somewhat disappointing. it would have cost more to send it back so i decided id just deal with it.

the other thing ive had trouble with is  more of a structural problem and a specification oversight. high performance hardware is plastered with beefy heat sinks. your video card has a beefy heat sink, if you want to overclock your cpu will have a beefy heat sink (i dont and the stock cooler is usually adequate), and chances are your mobo will be covered in copper heat sinks and heat pipes. yet the case specifications were never intended to support these huge chunks of metal. if the heat sinks were directly secured to the case that would be in improvement. i dont like seeing the pcb and its plastic sockets used as structural members. the thing that especially disturbs me is the video card mounting. a screw and a plastic connector clip are supposed to support one of these beastly double wide cards that is mostly heat sink. i once had heat stress physically break one of the chips in the chipset, where the regular expansion and contraction of metal as it is heated and cooled pulled the top of the chip package (the manufacturer cemented it to the sink).

case specs need to be seriously rethought for the high end rung. id like to see video cards in a stack-able parallel mount configuration (maybe with a riser card, but that would block airflow, though i think something like a big pin array that would pass multiple buses and video cards that supported expansion would have a similar connector on their top side) that allows standoffs to pass the structural load down to the mobo mounting plate. if you wanted multiple video cards you just extend the standoffs and put in another card. i mean at least do something like double end mounting brackets where the other side of the card bolts to something, as it would require a less radical amendment to case specs.

[Retsof]

To answer the thread starter, I assume you have an old prejudice against ATI/AMD cards, but since some generation ago (say... x3000) that prejudice doesn't make any sense. AMD cards have since then been best in performance/price and haven't been buggy enough (at least by comparison with the competition's) to warrant any kind of worries.

  Thanks,  it just seemed that ati's seemed to be bug prone, but really all i needed was confirmation.

[Klaustrophobia]

ATI works flawlessly for me.  i have a 6950 with the extra shaders unlocked.  the only thing i don't like is the ATI drivers seem to be content to let the card cook rather than increase the fan speed.  only presents a problem when overclocking though.  it would be nice to have a way to fix this driver-level.  i can use MSI afterburner, but i don't like having third party stuff running in the background controlling my card.

[Retsof]

So, opinions on this ?

[pecenipicek]

nvidia for life, yo.



in short, ati sucks IMO, without dragging out the war again. from what i've heard the GTX560 is a beast, but i'm really not under any sort of rush to upgrade anywhere, due to the fact that my old-ish GTX260 can still play many all games at very reasonable quality and framerate.



you might want to check out however how hot the GPU's you're looking at get. i've had so much grief with this gtx260 and its heating...

[IceFire]

To answer the thread starter, I assume you have an old prejudice against ATI/AMD cards, but since some generation ago (say... x3000) that prejudice doesn't make any sense. AMD cards have since then been best in performance/price and haven't been buggy enough (at least by comparison with the competition's) to warrant any kind of worries.

  Thanks,  it just seemed that ati's seemed to be bug prone, but really all i needed was confirmation.

On rare occasion people make this statement but never seem to really be able to back it up. I've owned nVidia cards the last several video card purchases but the AMD cards are always worth a look and I just so happened to stumble onto a better price/performance deal for a nVidia card each time. AMD makes great video cards and so does nVidia. There are tradeoffs back and forth a little bit but ultimately it's the same. Sometimes video drivers are buggy but that's pretty universal... nVidia and AMD.

[Kosh]

Nvidia isn't the number one maker of discrete graphics chips anymore guys, it's like that for a reason.

[Admiral LSD]

On rare occasion people make this statement but never seem to really be able to back it up. I've owned nVidia cards the last several video card purchases but the AMD cards are always worth a look and I just so happened to stumble onto a better price/performance deal for a nVidia card each time. AMD makes great video cards and so does nVidia. There are tradeoffs back and forth a little bit but ultimately it's the same. Sometimes video drivers are buggy but that's pretty universal... nVidia and AMD.

heh, I've had precisely the opposite experience, every time I've looked to buy a new GPU it's always been AMD/ATi that have offered the best price/performance. First it was a 9500 Pro with my Athlon XP (which I side-graded to a 9800 Pro because I saw one cheap on eBay), then a 4850 with my Athlon X2/Phenom II setup and now, with a few other factors to consider (I needed a relatively short card with miserly power consumption since I didn't want to have to buy a new PSU along with the new GPU), I've wound up with a 6850 in the i5 rig. I will admit, however, there have been a few times in the past where, was I looking to buy at said times, nVidia would have been a smarter choice (the 8800GT, the GTX460 and a coule of others I can't remember off-hand). As for dirver issues, the most grief I've ever had in something like nearly 7 years of using ATi cards is when, a couple of years ago, there were issues with AGP cards over about a 6-8 month period, but that's forgivable since AGP was long since dead at that point and I should have upgraded to a PCIe setup years before the issue occured.

[Grizzly]

The only bugs I have ever encountered with either brand are backwards compatability issues with new drivers and (very) old games, like Shogun, Age of Empires, Baldur's Gate, Republic Commando. However, each manafacturer has its own problems with that, and it is easily solved (dailing down 3d Acceleration in DXDiag usually does the trick).

[Fury]

Noise is much bigger concern than which brand sucks more. Research properly to find a quiet cooling solution. That said, both brands have had their own share of problems in both hardware and drivers. No matter which you get, you will probably have at least small amount of grief getting a game or two working properly. As far as FSO goes, at least atioglxx.dll trick works for ATI which cannot be said for NVIDIA. On the other hand, NVIDIA has less of those issues than ATI. But if and when it does, you're either stuck with old driver or broken FSO until it is fixed. (better hope it will get fixed)

[achtung]

AMD offers better price/performance ratio. Linux support is still not up to par with nVidia. If you get an AMD card, try to get a reference card, and wait until the Radeon HD 7xxx series comes out.

nVidia has better drivers. Linux support using nVidia's drivers is much more stable.

I used to be nVidia-only. I picked up a 6950 for my latest build, and it's been stellar.

[miskat]

As has been said, ATI is better performance per dollar.

nVidia is better high end performance and stability (IMO.)

I tend to stick with nVidia, personally, as that company seems more endorsed by software companies which aids in comparability and performance.  I am also fond of PhysX, when people program for it.

But YMMV, so go with what you like.

I have owned both in the past so this is simply my experience.  (Owned a Geforece2, then 9800 Pro, then 3850 AGP, then 2x460+GT250 so I've run a decent gamut.)  I still miss my Voodoo3.  lol