Originally posted by: Ilmater
Originally posted by: camswinton
Originally posted by: Pete
Both are excellent budget choices... Whichever card is noticably cheaper, go for it.
If the same price, the answer is not so clear... I'd probably lean towards the Radeon 9100 myself.
Everyone - Thanks for the input so far! There does seem to be a big price difference between the 9100 and the Ti4200 - I can get the 9100 from googlegear for less than $70 and the Ti4200 is almost twice that (as is the 9500). Not sure if the small speed increase is worth the extra ~$60 for the Ti4200. Is the fan noise much different between the two cards?
All of these people are on crack. We clearly have a bunch of fanATIcs in here. The newer Ti4200's are DEFINITELY worth the price. Almost all of them are clocked well above stock settings. I just got a Ti4200 from Newegg last night, and it comes clocked 10MHz over the stock core, and ~35MHz over the stock RAM. Everyone's telling you that the two cards are "nearly equal with all the quality settings turned up." Now I don't want to start a flame, but you ATI fanATIcs are obviously either unable or unwilling to look through his eyes. He is
clearly a budget consumer, and is looking for the card that will perform better now and keep performing well later.
Let's compare both cards on this basis. Remember, the 9100 is just a renamed 8500. There is absolutely zero difference besides the name. If you look at
Tom's VGA charts, you'll see that the 8x 128MB Ti4200 performs between 20 and 40 fps better on every test except JK II where its lead shrinks to only 3 or 4 fps. Its 3DMark score is over 2,000 marks above the 128MB Radeon, and nearly 2,000 above the 64MB version (which is messed up to begin with).
What does this mean for you? Right now, if you got the Ti4200, it would run considerably faster than the Radeon 9100 without AA or AF enabled (which is probably how you play anyway), and the same or better than the 9100 with AA/AF on. In the future, when
neither card would be able to handle games with AA/AF turned on, the Ti4200 will play games
far better than the 9100.
Now, above and beyond all of those reasons, there is also overclocking. The core on the Ti4200 and the Ti4600 are identical. In fact, most Ti4200's are now being sold with the same 8-layer PCB that the Ti4600 has (instead of the old 6-layer PCB) and nearly the same RAM as the Ti4600 (3.3ns vs. 2.8ns). Even if you're squeemish about overclocking now, imagine when you're getting to where games are running a little too slow on your card. You can turn things up then. I just got
this ASUS card from Newegg last night, and it overclocked easily (with stock cooling) to 320MHz core and 690MHz RAM. That's WELL over the speeds of a stock Ti4600. That's quite a bit of extra punch a year or more down the road. It raised my 3DMark score by more than 1,300.
I would never say that there aren't MANY times when an ATI cards would better fit someone's needs, but the Ti4200 is, IMHO, your best bet in thsi instance.
BTW, don't worry about image quality. As Schadenfroh said and I can now fully attest to, there is no problem with the 2D image quality of my ASUS Ti4200.