Jonathan Davies

 

 

 

When looking at the components of the PC I am building one of the things that I knew would be very important was the graphics card, as I’m pushing the spec of this machine towards that sort of usage, but through this I was left with a very big decision. ATI or nVidia. These are the two names that are always brought up when talking about GPUs; you will find as with the PC V Mac argument this is equally as furious, so lets talk about what you should be looking at and who has the best to offer at the moment.

It all really depends on three factors: your budget, what you are doing and how much performance you want from the card.

If you have a relatively small budget of, lets say around $100 dollars then it probably doesn’t matter to you and in fact it doesn’t really matter at that stage because the cards between both ATI and nVidia are very similar. But if you are a hardcore gamer then things really start to change; at the moment most gamers are looking towards the best graphics card in the business at the moment - the nVidia Geforce 8800GTX (The GPU that I am looking at putting in my PC). It offers a variety of clock-speeds, but believe it or not is not the best card around. Make way for the ATI 2900XT this is actually the best card out there, but there is one problem, it’s a lot more expensive then nVidia’s offerings and frankly, if you ask me isn’t a performance increase enough to be worth the money.

There are also a few other things that you have to take into account. ATI’s high end cards run hot, very hot and uses up a lot of power. Most of the time this mammoth of a card can’t fit inside your average case; while nVidia’s cards of about the same spec are smaller and more efficient. On the opposing side, there have been reports that nVidia’s Windows Vista drivers aren’t up to scratch compared to ATI’s. So if you’re looking for better driver support then ATI might be up your alley.

What GPU do you have in your PC, if you built it why did you chose nVidia over ATI or vis versa. Answer by leaving a comment or using the contact form.