I'm thinking this is a good buy.

Can anybody comment on it's noise level?

While I do not own the Gainward 4800 card, I do have experience with an ALMOST identical product, the Gainward Ti4600. In general, Gainward designs their video cards for high-performance/overclocking. Before I purchased my Gainward model, I never really paid any attention to the noise of a video card as my previous cards used a rather quiet fan (Creative GeForce 2 GTS 64MB) or none at all (ATI Rage 128 16MB). However, I can surely say that the fan used on the Gainward video card is quite whiny -- so loud that I could not stand it and had to slap a zm80a-hp in place of the fan. I would think that Gainward's GPU fan does a good job in the cooling department, yet I also remember viewing a website that listed Gainward's fan around 7 dB louder than the typical Ti4600 fan. If you're a silencing enthusiast, I would think that the Gainward fan would not be acceptable by SPCR standards.

By the way, why are you interested in buying a Ti4800?

Thank you MGP. Useful info.

Why am I interested? Because I am building a quiet system and I intend to play Quake 3 on it, but it's not going to be a gaming system only. In my current rig I have a GeForce2 Ultra. Great card by my standards, and also not too loud. I stumbled across the Gainward by accident, read about it, realized it was practically a Ti4600, and thought what a good buy for $159. The FX line of cards are too expensive and probably too loud for SPCR guys like us.

But honestly, you have convinced me otherwise about the Gainward card. I have a GeForce3 that I had intended to put in the system I'm building, so I may as well give it a chance. I have no idea how loud it is because it was given to me by a friend. If it's quiet and performs as well as the GeForce2 Ultra then I'll keep it.

Wedge don't just love Q3 - me too! Been playing only Q3 for almost 3 yrs now -

As far as cards go, you might look into the ATI side of things, I am super happy with my low end ATI 7200 paid only 80 us $ for it about 6 months ago and plan to go for the ATI passive cooled 9600 - ati makes some pretty nice low noise cards.

Goodluck m8.

Yeah, the Ti4800 is overkill IMO if you play Q3...if i had the $159, i wouldnt go for the 4800...go for something like the Radeon 9600 Pro/nonpro...sapphire is marketing a fanless version (which should be legit b/c ati has said that the 9600 series may run fanless without extra power connectors, i.e. radeon 9700/9800). Another plus is that the 9600 series support DX9 shaders and will be able to fully take on games like Doom3. I have a fanless Sapphire Radeon 9200, and I love it! If you want to go on a budget, I would definitely recommend this card! Got it from Newegg.com, and it ROCKS!!!

Well my gainward Ti4400 is the loudest fan in my system. Louder than 80mm vantec stealth fans, or my antec true430. IF you can find a good deal on them saphire sells ATI cards with zalman heatpipe heatsinks pre-installed. The problem is I've never seen a good deal on one of those models yet.

I found a SAPPHIRE ATI RADEON 9600 256MB 8X AGP DVI/TV Bulk (OEM) at newegg for $165.

Does this card run Quake 3 well? I have only played on nvidia cards. Nvidia has nothing less than spectacular driver support and it's part of the reason I lean toward them. I really don't know how this ATI card would stack up against what I'm used to seeing (GeForce2 Ultra 64MB). I've only seen a 9700 pro running MOHAA (which rocked), but it's the only ATI new-generation high-end card that I have seen.

Why am I not seeing any specs on these cards like core speed and memory speed? What about throughput per sec?

I would like to compare these to nvidia chip-based cards.

I would tend to say save some cash and buy the 128 MB card. If you're playing a game that needs 256 MB you'll want to get a faster GPU anyways. And the info on bandwidths etc can be found here http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1812&p=1

Thanks for that Talz, just what I was asking for.

How are the ATI drivers these days? About a year and 1/2 - 2 years ago, I would hear/read rumors that driver support was lacking, i.e., lots of problems would come up that took ATI forever to address. I'm thinking it must better these days with the rise in ATI popularity (if it were even bad at all).

I had a matrox g400 since it was released and loved the drivers. (well, the whole card ) Anyway, I changed it for a radeon 9500 that I modded to be a 9700. I have'nt had one problem with the card or drivers since I got it, and I was worried... The 2d image quality is alot better then the nvidia 4xxx series, (not as good as the matrox though) and I guess this might even last me longer when dx9 games come out.

Get the MSI Tom's approved one.

here:

http://www17.tomshardware.com/graphic/2 ... de-70.html

About the same price, and comes with a TON of extra stuff.