GeForce FX 5900 vs 5600???? help

[XeohTheRogue]

Ok... I have decided that $500 for either an ATI 9800 or a GeForce FX 5900 is too much for me to spend on a video card..
Then i noticed the GeForce5600, still a 256mb video card that runs only around $250..

Why is it so cheap?
This link compares the GeForce FX 5900 to the 5600...

http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?PAGE=fx_desktop

The only two large differences i see is that the 5900 has "Ultrashadow" and 330mil vertices/sec as opposed to the 88million vertices/sec of the 5600.

Can someone tell me what exactly all this means, and why it makes the 5900 nearly double the price?

[The__tweaker]

The 5600 is nowhere near the 5900 card in performance, actually it's often a bit slower than the GF4 Ti4200 which can be had from around $100 dollars and up. Sure it may sound nice to get 256Mb videomem but it's poor performance will make it an unnecessary big amount of memory.

The FX5600 has support for DX9 though which is the only benefit from getting one over the Ti4200. The latter is as mentioned often faster and it will cost ya only half of the amount the 5600 would..

The Ti4200 with 128Mb memory is really sweet and cheap cards with quite good overclock ability..


:cheers:

[zeradul]

Newegg is selling Gainward 5600's with 256 MB of ram for 155$

[amd_man2005]

If ya look around you can catch an ATI radeon 9500pro for under $200 occasionally Also ive seen used r8500's go for $60, and they are nearly as good as a TI4200 i belive, if you get a decent OC outta them

[Mista K6]

I second the praise of the Ti4200, I got mine from 250/512 stock up to 291/590 w/ no air flow (I have one CPU exhaust fan on my case w/ a duct to directly over the CPU). A really sweet card at a really sweet price. And it does perform better than the Radeon 8500 and the FX5600, check out some benchmarks. : peace2: Mista K6

[Riv3n]

Get GeForce4 Ti 4600 or a RADEON 9700 Pro, both under $250 (not sure about the 9700 Pro...). No where near $500 :p