Rosewill or Jetway ATI cards any good?

[Handruin]

My buddy is looking to replace his aging ATI Radeon 64DDR with a faster card for his gaming addictions. His current system is similar to my now-dead MSI K7T Pro 2a with a 1Ghz athlon. He isn't ready to upgrade the actual PC, but he'd like to improve his video performance.

My suggestion was an ATI 9600XT for $134. I know the card is faster than his system can utilize, but if he upgrades down the road, he could still use this card. My other suggestion was a Jetway ATI RADEON 9600LE for much less ($70).

Has anyone used either of these cards by the two various manufacturers? I found limited reviews on each board, so I'm weary of recommending them to him before asking around a bit.

 

[Mercutio]

I have nothing at all to say about Rosewhatever, but Jetway has a reputation as pretty much the rock-bottom worst-of-the-worst WRT motherboards.

Which is kind of too bad, since newegg has a Jetway branded 17" LCD with DVI connector and a pretty good 450:1 contrast ratio for $260.

Anyway, yeah, I've never used Jetway equipment personally but, after having four or five shop techs at different times and in different places bring up Jetway as the worst equipment they'd ever worked on, singing the praises of ECS or AsRock in comparison, I think I'd call Jetway "hardware to avoid".

 

[Buck]

I prefer to stay away from those two brands. I have some of the same feelings about them as Mercutio does. For me, it's either Sapphire or plain-Jane ATI.

 

[Mercutio]

Powercolor and Gigabyte are also good choices.

 

[ddrueding]

Can't really speak WRT to brands, as I only use Sapphire or ATI, but I can definatly reccomend staying away from the "LE" cards. From what I've heard, they are significantly crippled variants.

 

[Handruin]

Thanks for the feedback. I looked through newegg for more Sapphire boards, but most of their cards were out of stock when I looked last night. I can obviously look elsewhere, but I found it rather odd that newegg was out of so many cards. I was hoping to reduce the cost with a non-ati packaged video card, but it seems this might cause more support problems than it's worth.

I'll look into the gigabyte and Powercolor also. I stay clear of the Rosewill and Jetway, they sound like a headache I don't need.

Have any of you run into problems running a newer card on an older system? Most of the ATI's I've been looking at support 4x/8x AGP, and he will need 4x due to the age of the motherboard.

 

[ddrueding]

I noticed newegg's scarcity of video cards myself the other day, don't know what's going on.

IIRC, if the board supports AGP 4x, than any 8x cards will also work. The funky incompatabilities were all between 1x, 2x, and 4x.

 

[Buck]

How about a Sapphire 9600 Pro 128MB for $120.00?

 

[Handruin]

That's not a bad price. The ATI version (OEM) is $125 for the 9600Pro, however they are out of stock. :-? I'll dig up some reviews on the sapphire's for comparison sake.