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now that ive been thinking of commiting to possibly buy a new vid card, i heard that some cards have certain brands of memory that suck, and such... so how do i buy a card from say an online retailer or a regular retail store and determine if it has this shoddy memory? also sometimes i see the boxes for say a 9600 pro and it has no description of the mem and clock speed, can i find out before i buy or do i find out after i buy?
bump
The answer to this quandry is to READ about a card on the internet and then go and buy it if you decide it sounds good. If you buy a no name brand then you always run the risk of getting a card that does not run at full spec. After selling all manner of video cards for some time now I can tell you that quite a number of the cheaper no name cards do NOT run at full specification. Mainly, it seemed that the memory was clocked slower than the reference designs of the cards. The FX 5200 noname cards were TERRIBLE for this. We actually switched to Radeon 9200's instead of 5200's, just too shoddy. You must read about the card you want froma well respected card reviewer and make your desicion from there. Believe what the salesman says at your own risk.
i have read up on all the cards i want, the problem is if i see 3 of the same type (ie a 9600pro made by sapphire, radeon, visiontek) all with variable prices, how can i choose the one with the best rating if i know the GENERAL specs from online but not the ones of the cards before me (ive read posts and posts about people who've all bought the same card but each one gets diff specs all for the same card)