Tetrium wrote:This is a gripe for me as I always buy mid-range. I used a Radeon 9600 for years before upgrading to a GF7600GS and thought the GF7600GS was actually a disappointing upgrade. The HD4670 and HD5670 have been very good to me though, even though the HD4670 didn't perform it's primary task (which was to give some extra life to my aging AGP box).
IMHO you don't get much value from the lower mid-range or from the absolute top . Try settling on cards from the so-called "upper-mid", i.e. the crippled versions of the absolute top or mid-range implementations of such cards.
Some recent examples of super-duper cards that sold for mid-range (or even low-end prices) are Radeon X800 GTO- in '06-early 07 these were sold at 6200 money due to lacking SM3- still very fast for HL2/ Far Cry/ FEAR though, Radeon X1950GT - in '07 these were going for 8500GT money, Radeon 2900GT/ Pro - early '08 at 8600GT prices, 3850/ 8800GT/ 9800GT/ GTS 250/ Radeon 4850- last prices were always around $100, GTX460 768mb was quick to fall from grace due to the 1gb model but performs the same at anything except 1920x1020 res & above- sold last year at Radeon 5770 prices and currently the 5850 is really cheap.
My barometer for selecting the above cards is that they must be able to play the latest titles from their generation at least at high settings- which all of them do- at low-end/ mid-range money.
For AGP cards I've had the 4200ti and 9600 Pro which were super for their era, then 6200 both 64 bit and 128 bit both which were absolute shit, then 6600 vanilla which was hardly any better (also a bag of runny shit).
Only when I went to the 6800 level did I feel any difference and my last AGP card bought new was a Radeon 3850- which was of course ball blisteringly quick and a top card. 'course you need a reasonbly beefy cpu to extract it's full potential- another common trait which the later 4650/70 AGP require. Mine were on a Athlon 3000+ clocked at 2.4ghz/ DFI NF3 Ultra -D/ 2gb ram and Intel E2180@2.86ghz/ Asrock 775i65G/ 2gb ram.