Personal computing discussed
Moderators: renee, morphine, SecretSquirrel
I agree TheCollective, but are they worth the extra price, esp with how much that varies dep on country?
As said the non-ATI Radeons often use lower clocks (although some use higher) and sadly with Rad7500 some even choke it with SDR instead of DDR. You can tell pretty easily by seeing if you get GF2GTS/GF4MX420 perf or else GF4MX perf would suggest SDR RAM.
non-ATI Rad manus also often skimp on RAMDACs meaning you lose dual display functionality, other things like image and build quality can also suffer.
In general, worst case non-ATI Rad is losing about 10% perf, o/c'ability, dual display, looser (but still not problematic) build quality and a little image quality ... but poor Rad IQ is still better than most GF2 and GF3 cards so all round it isn't too bad even in worst case ... unless you got dumped with an SDR card 
Austin wrote::cry: non-ATI Rad manus also often skimp on RAMDACs meaning you lose dual display functionality, other things like image and build quality can also suffer.
Dissonance wrote:Better multimonitor support — ATI's multimonitor software hasn't changed with the RV250. You can still run multiple monitors with different refresh rates, color depths, and screen resolutions. What has changed is how the chip deals with multiple displays in hardware. The original R200 GPU integrated a single RAMDAC for VGA output and a single TMDS transmitter interface to drive DVI-capable monitors like flat-panel LCDs. Output to a second VGA monitor, connected via a DVI-to-VGA adapter, had to be handled by a second, board-mounted RAMDAC, and TV output was handled by ATI's Rage Theatre chip.
Third-party manufacturers flooded the market with a lot of R200-based boards, and many cut out that second RAMDAC, presumably to save money. Cutting out the second RAMDAC castrated the R200's multiple monitor support, making it impossible to run two VGA monitors, even with a DVI-to-VGA adapter. For consumers, this was a nightmare; support for two VGA monitors didn't appear to be standardized for R200-based products in any way. ATI's own boards had the extra RAMDAC, but boards from Hercules using identical R200 GPUs lacked that all-important second RAMDAC.
The RV250 solves all the multimonitor uncertainty by integrating a single TMDS transmitter interface in addition to two 400MHz RAMDACs. Also, there's a TV encoder right on the GPU. Any graphics board using the RV250 chip, regardless of manufacturer, should have support for dual VGA monitors via a DVI-to-VGA adapter. The Radeon 9000 Pro's simpler and cheaper board design doesn't require a second RAMDAC or a Rage Theatre chip. Consumers should now know better what kind of multimonitor support they're getting, regardless of the brand of Radeon 9000 Pro they're purchasing.
