ATI videocard questions

[soupnatizzle]

well, after reading bad things about the 7900, its instability, i desided ill spend the extra 30-40 dollars and get a 1900xt instead. i just have a few questions

i dont understand why this card would run for so much more then the other, when i cant find a diffrence in them. please explain..

here (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814102003)

here (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814121001R)

[saphalline]

The second one is the CrossFire version. That one is required alongside a standard version for using CrossFire. Unlike SLI where the vid cards are the same, ATI's CrossFire puts the burden of implementation on the vid cards. One is normal, the other is a more expensive CrossFire version that has the "merging chip" on it. This CrossFire chip is the part that communicates with the other vid card and manages the shared load. NVidia's SLI uses chipset support to work. This is why ATI's CrossFire was supposed to be so good - it works without needing a special ATI chipset. It is nearly platform independent. Unfortunately, ATI's time-to-market with CrossFire edition vid cards has been insanely slow until recently. This allowed NVidia to dominate the ultra high end graphics market for nearly 2 years without much of a fight from ATI.

As an aside, what have you heard about the 7900 GT? My friend has one and it runs flawlessly.

[soupnatizzle]

mostly just in overclocked 7900s about 1/3 of the reviews state that they chip was great at first but after a few days just died on them and was rendered usless, i mean i could get a non over clocked like this here (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814130015) it was good reviews and runs games well, (never games almost max) or for 60 dollars more this here (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814121554) (not sure if this is a crossfire chip) and possible not even bother with SLI in a few months, saving myself money in the long run.

all you have to do is read the reviews and you can see that the ATI card is the smarter buy

one more question i must ask, would an ATI card run on a NVIDIA nForce 570 chipset?

[saphalline]

all you have to do is read the reviews and you can see that the ATI card is the smarter buyAre you reading the reviews on Newegg, or are you reading real reviews on the tech sites? I don't know what some of those morons on Newegg do to their vid cards, but I've never had one run for 3 weeks then die inexplicably. There's always something that causes it. Whether they don't have adequate cooling in their case, or they have a cr@ppy PSU, or they installed it wrong - I don't know what they do, but I never trust those Newegg reviews. Go straight to the tech sites and read those reviews. The 7900's are perfectly trustworthy and run just fine.

But in terms of a single vid card solution, you are correct that a Radeon X1900 GT or XT is better than a 7900 GT. It's just more powerful. My friend got an SLI mobo, however, so we decided that SLI is a better alternative for him than a single X1900 GT/XT. But yes, an ATI vid card will work fine on an NVidia chipset. And an NVidia vid card will work fine on an ATI chipset. They may be rivals, but they're not stupid! ;)