what is a good brand for Radeon cards?

[Shadowmeph]

since this is my first build and a learning process for me I am going to be buys an Radeon 3850 vid card I am asking this because on the NCIX site the prices vary quite a bit and am wondering which company builds are the good/ better ones?

[BALISTX]

I would have to HIS probably makes some of the best HIS cards. I would go for the HIS ICEQ3s, they are more $$ but the cooling is better than the stock cooling.

[Eldonko]

I agree, HIS is the way to go. Never buying sapphire again, they are jerking me around on RMA because I had the stupid HSF off to run H20. Watercooling the card didnt kill the mem, their crappy chips did, but try telling them that.

[sswilson]

Yeah I would vote for HIS due to their use of non-reference cooling. Most ATI cards are pure reference design, and I've found that to be mostly lacking. I gave up on sapphire after listening to suggestions that it was my PSU or case airflow which was causing overheating on a non-OC'd card, but since they use a reference design I suspect other manufacturers with the same reference cooling have the same issue. (I don't think I should have to shell out an extra $50 on a vid card to put an after-market cooling solution on a non-OC'd card).

That said.... for reference design cards, I'd go ASUS as they seem to have a much better suite of utilities bundled with their cards.

[Synth]

DirectCanada has an MSI Radeon HD3870 RX for 216$, btw...

Edit: as for choice of manufacturers, I've never had any problems with the Palit, Sapphire, Powecolor and Gigabyte ATI cards.

[icodeit]

I have always been happy with the ASUS implementation of AMD/ATI cards.

[ebdoradz]

Originally Posted by icodeit

I have always been happy with the ASUS implementation of AMD/ATI cards.

i had a Asus 6600GT pcie and their warranty policies sucks

if you change the cooler the waranty is void, bla bla bla .....

for nvidia baase card i have always used evga-xfx-bfg im now using xfx-bfg because evga had trouble with canadian rma, even if its fixed ... im out

ati card - HIS or Saphire, already had a powercolor but i have hate that card more then everything else.

[Keir]

I don't know what the warranty is like but Visiontek has a lifetime warranty. They also had no way of knowing I removed the stock cooler, but removing the stock cooler pretty much voids every cards warranty.

I'd stay away from sapphire. My last set of cards ( x1950pro's ), they refused to acknowledge that they didnt provide enough cooling for the VRMs and people were having issues, they simply ignored it and said it wasn't an issue, forcing people to go buy those little ram heatsinks and place them on our own boards.

Not good customer service at any rate.

[sswilson]

Originally Posted by Keir

I don't know what the warranty is like but Visiontek has a lifetime warranty. They also had no way of knowing I removed the stock cooler, but removing the stock cooler pretty much voids every cards warranty.

I'd stay away from sapphire. My last set of cards ( x1950pro's ), they refused to acknowledge that they didnt provide enough cooling for the VRMs and people were having issues, they simply ignored it and said it wasn't an issue, forcing people to go buy those little ram heatsinks and place them on our own boards.

Not good customer service at any rate.

This is why I'm avoiding Sapphire this time around. They did eventually change the design of the VRMs to fix the problem but that was only after close to a year of telling people it was either poor case airflow or underpowered PSUs.

I've owned both a 1950pro and a 9600XT manufactured by sapphire. Both cards required aftermarket cooling to run at stock speeds without overheating.

[Ugly n Grey]

Originally Posted by Synth

DirectCanada has an MSI Radeon HD3870 RX for 216$, btw...

Isn't that card using DDR 3 instead of DDR 4? I mean I'm not sure how they can call it a 3870 as that core combined with DDR 3 is supposed to be called a 3850....