Keep the 9800 Pro or the FX 5900? You tell me. . .

[jonwes]

Here's the scoop. . . I bought a BFG Asylum FX 5900 about two weeks ago, so I have two weeks left to take it back if need be. I'm very, very happy with the build of this card. Much more substantial than the ATI and great cooling, not to mention a TRUE lifetime warranty. Very overclockable as well. . .

After reading many reviews (on here & elsewhere), Half Life 2 benches, etc, I picked up an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB today. I'm into visuals, so I always prefer running games @ 1280x1024 and 4XAA/8XAF. I have about two weeks to decide which card to go with for the long run (or at least the next couple of years). The Radeon ran me $295, while the FX 5900 ran $249.

Stability is very important to me (I don't like headaches), which has me concerned about the ATI already. I had a nightmare with a 9700 Pro, which I'm hoping won't repeat with the 9800. I'm going to take everyone's advice on here and run Detonator RIP in addition to the standard control panel uninstall.

Come one, come all! Which card would you keep and why???

[bob05]

I would just keep 5900. You said you have had fine performance with it, and I see no reason why to change. Both are pretty fast as far as games go anyway.

[RamonGTP]

I would keep the 9800 Pro... I made the switch from nVidia to ATI about a week ago and am very pleased with the 9800 Pro... Not sure what you mean by build quality is much more substantial than the ATI, but I do know that BBA (Built By ATI) cards are very high quality. If you're refferring to the cooling, its there because it HAS to be there, it runs a lot hotter than the ATI card does... Then there is the fact that the FX cards don't seem to do all that great in many DX9 games.

[tgxiii]

I would keep the 9800 Pro also. I don't know if the stability problems you had with the 9700 Pro is true for all ATi cards (I've heard other people having problems with the 9700 Pro also), but I recently upgraded from a 5600 to a 9600 Pro and my system has been running stable.

Plus, if you really liked the massive GeForce heatsink, you can always buy yourself a Zalman heatpipe cooler!

[Rugor]

I wouldn't have bought the FX5900 myself, so you know which card I would keep. But you aren't me, so I'd suggest putting the 9800 Pro in your machine for at least a week and seeing how you like it before making any decision.

However, there are two other things to consider. First, the 5900's forte is today's games and the 9800's is tomorrow's. As PS2.0 usage becomes more and more widespread you will see a faster performance drop with the Nvidia card than the ATI card. Second, the reason the NV card seems more solid is probably because of the larger heatsink, which it needs because it runs hotter.

I shifted from Nvidia to ATI about 8 months ago and haven't had a single problem. In fact the only problem I've ever had where a driver wouldn't let me run a game was with Nvidia.

[jonwes]

Thanks for the feedback from everyone. I popped the 9800 Pro in last night and threw everything that is currently installed on my system at it: Freedom Fighters, Simpsons Hit & Run, Project 64, Call Of Duty, Soldier Of Fortune II, Rainbow Six 3 Ravenshield, Need For Speed Underground, and XIII. Not a single problem with any of them (knock wood)! The picture quality is definitely better than the FX, which I'd imagine has a lot to do with ATI's Smoothshader technology? Call Of Duty in particular feels like you're looking at more of a photo or painting than the FX that looks more like computer graphics with very defined edges. To each their own, but I took a real liking to the image that the 9700 Pro put out a while back and now I have it back with the 9800. As much as I liked the FX 5900, I bundled it up today and took it back for a refund. I'm really hoping that the 9800 proves stable and reliable moving forward. At $295 it was a pretty good deal and it scored within 10 points of the FX 5900 in 3DMark03 at about 5,280 on my Athlon XP 2000 system. Given that they both scored so closely on it and Project64 showed almost an identical framerate as well from each of the two cards, the deciding factor was the image quality and the fact that Half Life 2 should run much better on the 9800, although I am concerned about Doom III, given the preliminary benchmarks. Does anyone know how the ATI's will do with that? Thanks.