Going to buy a gfx card, so doing some research, some thoughts...

Going to buy a gfx card for two reasons. 1. My CPU isn't keeping up with 1080P videos without hardware H.264 acceleration and 2. I'm so late in playing UT3.

And with the advent of G92-based cards that brought prices of current cards down a lot, it's time to source for a cheap 2nd-hand card that's good. And must be able to play UT3 with decent speed/image quality. And still, it must be low-power, as I'm a pc-silencer. :)

While the x1950pro has the best bang-for-buck since its launch, ATi cards' high heat and lack of overlay color profiles (needed for accurate color in games/videos if you have a calibrator, which I do) turn me off. Same goes for the x1900GT. It's sad, since these two cards have very good price/performance ratio and are just strong enough to keep up with current games.

The 7600GT is just the opposite - low heat, overlay color profiles, less price/performance (but not by much, since it's also one of the best during its time), and almost barely unable to play UT3.

And the problem? Shaders. 7600GT era was when people didn't care too much about shaders. x1000 series changed that, as with 8000 series. And as such, 8600GT's performance in UT3 is so spectacular it was unbelivable - it is about twice as fast as a 7600GT and faster than a 7900GT.

Well, that's at very high settings though. At lower settings, the 8600GT's weakness - lack in everything else, should show.

Now this brings a very interesting situation. Since we all know that the 8600GT is crap for price-to-performance compared to the rest of the cards, especially 8800GT and 9600GT, the latter priced at only $239.

If we were to have an Unreal-per-dollar chart, the 7600GT ($70) would be 0.27, 8600GT ($100) would be 0.39, and a NEW 9600GT ($239) would be around 0.42.

Seriously, the 9600GT is one heck of a good card.

Now I'm confused, should I buy the 7600GT or wait till people start selling 2nd-hand 9600GT at $100+? That'd depend on whether that 7600GT is able to hit 800mhz mem, since I told the seller I'll take his card if it so. Well, at least with 800mhz the performance won't be too bad, since we know that 7600GT is memory-bottlenecked.