Just chiming in to say that I’ve finally bought a new GPU for our desktop. In the Gilmore branch of PC Express the clearance-bin 6600GT was unavailable and so was the HD3650. All they had aside from some poor 64-bit offerings were GPUs in the upper 4 thousand peso range (9700GT and HD4730) which obviously was way out of my price range. I went to PC-Gilmore and settled for a 512MB 128-bit 9400GT, which sold for 50 less than the unavailable HD3650.
Here’s a comparison (stats retrieved from Wikipedia):
Inno3d 9400 GT:
- 128-bit bus width
- 512MB GDDR2 Memory
- 12.8GB/s Memory Bandwidth
- 2.2 Gigapixel and 4.4 Gigatexel Fillrate
- 50 Watt TDP
- DirectX 10 Support
- 67.2 GigaFLOPS
Compared to the HD3650, the 9400GT has inferior fillrate, bandwidth and Floating Point performance but superior thermodynamic properties. It’s really unfortunate that I couldn’t procure one.
Compared to the 6600GT, the 9400GT has slightly superior fillrate and slightly inferior bandwidth. The 9’er of course has much more advanced technology from NVIDIA like DX10, 3D Vision, CUDA and better AA and AF. With a lot of new games pegging their minimum to the 7600, getting the 6600 may not be a very good idea.
In retrospect, the 9400 GT is leaps and bounds over my old ATI X1550 and NVIDIA 7200GS. Full HD playback is flawless and gaming performance has greatly improved. I could now play Medieval II: Total War with near 100% graphics at 1366x768 without AA. THQ’s Company of Heroes can be played near 90% without AA.
I’m pretty bored with Strategy games right now so I’m going to try getting Need For Speed: Shift tomorrow to try out the 9’er with current-gen graphics. I’ll also try to reinstall Call of Duty 4 to compare it with the 7200, which achieved 15-20fps on low graphics at low resolutions.
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