Originally posted by: Seanish
Right now I have an Asus EAX700 Pro PCI-E graphics card(that I liked a lot) that I was looking to upgrade for TES Oblivion. I ordered a refurbished Asus EAX1600 Pro for $100 off of newegg after a little research(not enough...). I have since discovered that this might even be a drop in performance and I'm stuck. Do I RMA the x1600 and stick with the x700? I've been looking at nvidia 7600GTs for $189, would that price not justify the upgrade? Any ideas would help
The X-numbered GPU's other than the X800's/850's have been variously described as upgrades to Radeon 9xxx's, or in the case of the X300, a duplicate of the Vanilla 9600, save for the thinner die, and PCI-e interface. The X700 Pro was slightly better than a 9800 Pro, but didn't track closely like the X300, nor just slightly more loosely like the X550 and X600, which appeared to be modified Radeon 9600 Pro and 9600 XT upgrades (on the thinner dies).
GPU Review's raw numbers on X700 Pro vs. Geforce 6600GT ->
http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php?card1=190&card2=103
(You might want to plug in the PCI-e versions. I haven't built any NF4 systems yet, so in all four cases for this comparison and the next, I'd plugged in the AGP cards I would've used. But my budget is a tight one, so I'm staying with a 9800XT.)
Those original X-numbered GPUs lacked the entire feature set supported by the Geforce 6xxx's. The X1600 started out overpriced by a ton for its comparative speed, but the X1xxx series does have all of the competitive features that the Geforce cards offered. Either one of the X cards you have tried did meet the minimum graphic requirements for Oblivion, but the 1600 went slightly further, ending up just slightly behind nVidia's 6600GT GPU and roughly the same speed bracket as the X700. It does have the best "Shader Model" of the X700 vs. 6600GT vs. X1600 matchup.
GPU Review's raw numbers on X1600 Pro vs. Geforce 6600GT ->
http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php?card1=190&card2=369
Like I mentioned, those were AGP that I compared a month ago. Here is my 9800XT vs. the X1600 Pro (AGP vs. PCI-e):
http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php?card1=36&card2=350
GPU Review's numbers are difficult to compare in any way other than
WITHIN the same families of GPU's, but the specifications appear to favor the 1600 Pro. You can plug in the X700 Pro (PCI-e) versus this X1600 Pro, but they are different GPU families.