Radeon or NVidia?

[RichardSeymour]

I got a nice new Rosewill case with 400 watt PSU for my birthday, along with a gig of matched Kingston value ram.... I have the funds and circumstance to upgrade the rest of the guts of my computer...

I'm swapping out my old beige box, Athlon 1800+, old GeForce, and lastgen Asus moboard and selling 'em to my old man for $120.

In turn I'm buying (probably) a 939 3000+ (I'd love to go higher but the jump from 3000+ to 3200+ is 50 bucks and that's a hell of an inefficient way to spend money) and an MSI Neo-4F.

The question is, which video card to get? I hear the NVIDIA 6600 GT is a pretty great sweet spot card with killer framerate.... but I have one friend who swears up and down that the Radeon, while having a lower framerate, actually looks better.

Also it's 175 for the 6600 GT.... if there's a high end card that's a little less good for substantially less scratch, I might dig that....

[Rob D]

As you are getting the MSI Neo-4F, I believe you will need a PCI-E graphics card. You should check this before buying the card.

The best graphics card on the market at the moment on a price/performance scale is the Radeon X800XL, though this does cost just under $300. In the the sub-$200 market the GF 6600GT is by far the best card available for the PCI-E bus. You can get one for as little as $146 over at www.newegg.com I have never used them myself as they don't ship outside of the US, but I have only heard good things about them.

.... but I have one friend who swears up and down that the Radeon, while having a lower framerate, actually looks better.

Your friend is referring to image quality. When comparing previous generations of the two brands, ATI does produce a better image. However with the latest cards from nvidia the difference is no longer significant. For the price range you have stated, the 6600GT is the best card you can buy.