I commented before in some post that I work selling PC components on the intertubes, so sometimes I can get interesting prices for myself. Yesterday I got a great offer to upgrade my video card for almost nothing. The model is a XFX 8500GT (I know it's a crappy model, but it's way better than my 7200GS) and my two choices are 512MB and 1GB. In the beginning I was getting the 1GB model (which costs 25 dollars more than the 512MB one), but I was reading in some sites that the RAM difference between these cards doesn't make a difference that worths it. For the moment I think I'll go with the 1GB model anyway, but has anyone seen any of these cards working or knows if the 1GB model is really better or it's just memory the card won't use?
As far as i know the 1gb card would be useful at high resolutions in games if i remember correctly but if it uses hypermemory for ATI or something like that for nvidia then it uses part of your systems Ram to make up the 1gb so in effect your getting half the memory and the card is using your ddr, ddr2 or ddr3 memory. yep this is what nvidia use to make some cards have more memory and it lists the 8500GT - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TurboCache
Well, I had to go with the 1GB model since the 512 was sold out this morning. Thanks a lot for the heads up anyway.
1GB is overkill on an 8800GT, so what do you think it's going to do for an 8500GT? Don't just look at the amount of RAM you have, also look at the memory bandwidth of the card. The 8500GT is only a 128-bit card, so that one gig of memory won't yield any performance increases. Just because it has twice the memory doesn't mean you will get twice the performance.
Not only is is pretty pointless on the cheaper cards, but they often use slower RAM on the 1Gb models.
