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Originally Posted by johnross2007  One of them has 1 gig of RAM but that is completely unnecessary especially since you are running XP (I assume 32-bit). Higher clock means more performance, but really not that much more. |
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Originally Posted by johnross2007 If you get that 1-gig card and Vista make sure you get Vista 64-bit so it will recognize all of the ram. The 1-gig is a little overkill and you might be better off getting a 9800GTX, though I don't really remember what your budget is. There's a reason the best single-GPU card only has 512MB of ram; 1 gig isn't necessary or even very useful yet. Not to say you won't see improved performance, but I doubt it would be worth the extra $80.
edit: oh and about PCI Express 2.0. don't worry about it; it is ahead of its time. It doubles the bandwidth between it and the motherboard, but the GPU STILL doesn't fill up the current generation system. It would be nice to know what motherboard you have though. |
Whats running WinXP 32 bit have to do with having 1GB of memory on the card & not being able to use it? it will use it no matter what...
but you are right that its not really necessary, the only advantage of having that much ram on a card right now is for larger/more textures on screen as well as larger insane resolutions... in which case the 9600GT will slow to a crawl by that time... depending on the game being run of course.
but as to a 32bit OS, if your running 3GB of RAM & a 1GB card, most likely what will happen is the OS will use less than 2GB of system memory & use the full 1GB on the card to best of its abilities.
to my knowledge, I've never heard of a 32-bit OS (at least of Windows) limiting the Graphics cards useable memory to less than 1GB... especially considering high end 512-640+ MB 3D Animation cards have been on the market for a Loooooooong time now, long before gaming cards got that high, & back then most people used 32bit windows as well...
anyways, yeah if he's going for the 9600GT just grab one of the 512MB models, it'll be good enough, just try to buy one of the fastest factory OC'd models you can for your money. (usually eVGA, XFX, BFG, or MSI these days, though Zotac & a few others have been producing some nice factory OC'd models lately too)