Differences between manufacturers?

[Omena]

Alright, so I'm planning to buy a nice ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, but there is one thing that bothers me. The price difference between different manufacturers seems to be quite big. Are there major differences in performance?

Here are some examples of price differences between different 9800 Pros:

Hercules 3D Prophet Radeon 9800 Pro 128 Mt AGP 394e

Micro-One Radeon 9800 Pro 128 Mt AGP 329e

PowerColor Radeon 9800 Pro 128 Mt AGP 339e

Sapphire Radeon 9800 128 Mt AGP 309e

Sapphire Radeon 9800 Atlantis Pro 128 Mt AGP 390e

Sapphire Radeon 9800 Pro Ultimate 128 Mt AGP 455e

Oddly enough, Sapphire has three variations of the 9800 Pro and the price difference is a whooping 146e!
Note that these are the cheapest prices in Finland and could be different for other people. What I'm interested in is how big the difference (if any) in performance is.

edit: Hmm the board doesn't support euros. e=euro

[Siber]

Well, how it works w/ video cards is that ATI and NVidia create the main chipsets and allow manufacturers to create the boards how they (the manufacturers) want to. So the Micro-One and PowerColor are probably not as popular brands of vid cards (I've never heard of 'em lol) But I ahve heard of Hercules 3D and Saphire. One of the three saphire cards is a regular, so that means that it is overall not as fast (yet is still very good to today's standards mind you). The "ultimate" thing I've never seen, but it probably means the clock speed is faster than the already faster Pro. There should be little difference in performance, only in support for the card. But even then I don't think it would be large enough to bother with unless someone out there has a different experience?

[The Heretic]

Never heard of powercolor!

:sweat: :sweat: :sweat: :sweat: :sweat:

Powercolors are naturally clocked at higher speeds, making them the second best brand of ATi's that you can buy, the first being Hercules, but good luck paying for one!

[Siber]

Clocked at higher speeds? Well, if that's tru then you've just changed everything haha. ATI puts out the chipsets and decides the clockspeeds of both the memory and GPU my friend, which for the 9800 pro is 380 (GPU) and 340 (memory) on any card you look at ^_^

Oh, and my bad on not knowing the powercolor thing lol.

[The Heretic]

For you "non-believers" out there, not mentioning any names *cough* Siber! *cough* heres some additional proof, to show that im not losing my mind.

"This card i received is clocked at 390/380Mhz by default as detected by various tweaking utilities but PowerColor mentioned that their cards are clocked at 380/340Mhz so there are some discrepancies here. Nevertheless, with the 2ns memory chips, 380Mhz at default won't be a problem at all. Since this card has a higher core and memory clock therefore it will definitely outshine its competitors in terms of performance."

The full review can be found here http://www.vr-zone.com/reviews/PowerColor/9800Pro/

PS: "Ultimate" could also mean it comes with a dumpload of additional stuff, like the "all in wonder series"...

[Omena]

Oh right, one of the Saphs wasn't even pro.

About higher default clocks then. Does it really make a difference if one manufacturer has higher clocks on their cards when I can just clock it myself too? Doesn't sound like a wise deal to pay for OC if you can do it yourself for free.

[The Heretic]

Basically, a powercolor will always be faster than a sapphire if you overclock them to the same rate.

However, the powercolor tends to overheat, so if you want to do any real overclocking with it, you'll need to replace that fan, or buy a huge one and keep it running into your case

[Omena]

Alright, thanks for your input. I think I'll pick the PowerColor one because of it's so much cheaper than a Hercules.