BleepingComputer.com: Moving Up To The Ati 3850, Got Questions.

I'm moving up my video card in my old AGP system and was going to go with the 3850. Well, I've heard Sapphire, HIS, and even Powercolor have problems with drivers, and heard the total opposite of the VisionTek Version of the card. I'm leaning towards the VisionTek one anyways because it only requires a 6 pin power connector compared to the others requiring an 8 pin.

I'm currently running a GeForce 7600 GT, and it runs fine but I've heard the 3850 (even the AGP Version) runs so much better, and want to add one last kick to this old system before starting the ongoing process of building my PCI-E system.

Basically I'm asking if the VisionTek card is worth the 80+ More dollars

The prime reason also, is because the VisionTek Card has the 6 pin connection. I'm getting a new power supply from my uncle, its an 650 but only has 6 pins. (I'm trading him directly for my old video card, for this new power supply).

This post has been edited by ChewieBacca: 30 September 2008 - 11:46 PM

I didn't see any VisionTek on newegg, but like this one http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16814161225 comes with a 2 molex into 1 8 pin adapter.
Or you could pick up something like http://www.circotech.com/6-inch-6-pin-pci-...ptor-cable.html In short don't pay a ton more just because it has the right kind of power connection. If you've got other reasons fine, but that's a lot to pay for convenience.

Also, you may want to know if you have an older processor, it can considerably bottleneck the graphics card. It's recommended to have at least an AMD athlon 64 single-core with a reasonably high frequency. Even Newer Pentium 4's can really bottleneck the graphics card. Either way, you're still going to see a performance increase over your old graphics card, but you may not see as big of an increase as you would like/should get.

I guess the biggest reason is the drivers, I heard VisionTek uses different drivers and run better than the HIS and Sapphire drivers (I've owned a Sapphire card before but never had any problems) know if there is any truth to this

I'm not sure the proper term to use is drivers, because every card model (such as 3850, 3870, 4850, 4870) uses the same drivers straight from the amd/ati website, no matter what brand they are. All three of those manufacturers you mentioned are very respectable. I've had a Sapphire, and it worked fine, and now I'm using a Visiontek graphics card, and it works fine too. I wouldn't worry too much about the brand you get, unless it's some weird off-brand company. Also, I wouldn't pay $80 more for the same graphics card, by a different company.

Now, by drivers, you might mean BIOS. This is the internal instructions that tell the graphics card basic things, like when to turn the fan on, what clock speeds to run at. It's not recommended for everyday users to upgrade the BIOS, but it is possible. I think HIS and Sapphire have BIOS' that work just as well as Visiontek's.