Ataris21

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I'm looking into buying a new video card, but I have to go cheap, nothing over $120 really. So I was wondering if getting a 9800 GT I found on Newegg is worth it over the 8500 GT. I've done hours upon hours of research over video cards (tech savvy), but it would be helpful to see if anyone would have an idea of the kind of performance increase I could get.
 

Ataris21

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That's what I assumed--I laughed when I found out that the 8500 was considered a mid-range card....

Also, is 1 GB of RAM over 512 MB of RAM worth a slight performance cut in clock? It seems to me like the better clock speeds would be better than the higher RAM.
 

Ataris21

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Thanks guys, but one last question: there are two mostly identical cards, except one has DDR3 with a 6-pin and the other has GDDR3 without a 6-pin. I thought GDDR3 was better, but the 6-pin might mean it's underclocked....
 

Ataris21

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Well, at the moment, I can play Oblivion at 1024x768 on Medium settings and still have pretty crappy framerate. So, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't need a ridiculously high resolution. XD

But which card would be better in this case?
 
The HD 4770 and HD 4850 are both within your price range and will give you significantly better performance. The HD 4770 consumes significantly less power than the HD 4850 and is on average about 6% slower.

Below are two performance comparison charts for Fallout 3 which uses the same engine as Oblivion (minor tweaks) which you can use as a comparison to the 9800GT and HD 4850 (knock off about 6% for the HD 4770):

f3_performance.gif


f3_mainstream.gif



You can max out the graphics settings at 1280 x 1024 and still manage to get about 50fps. Just food for thought...
 
Yeah, either the HD4670 or spend the extra money for an HD4770 or GTS 250. The GTS 250 is the most powerful card of the 3 but make sure your PSU can handle it. The other 2 are quite low power in comparison.
Even the HD4670 is several times more powerful than your old card fyi.