Sorry for another thread on the subject, but i'd figured i get a bit more responses quicker this way, seeing as how i plan on buying in the next few hours.. I did some digging around and came up with this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16814102492 Its a little more pricy, but it's got 16 pipelines, 500 mhz core clock, and a few nifty entertainment features (i got almost the same ones from buying my new soundblaster card awhile back. I chose that link above over this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16814102606 Im assuming the AIW out performs the x850pro (im aware that its out of stock, i have other sources )
I'm not too sure on the AIW's, but i guess if it is a little bit more, with added features, go for it... never saw any bad AIW's...
AIW just means it has a built in decoder fo media center stuff. it does in fact outperform the pro if you don't flash the pro to an XT(which isn't 100% guaranteed) if you want to save some $$$ get the pro and see if flashing ti works chances are it will and if it doesn't ohh well.. RMA time... err deal.. if you need the TV tuner capabilities well there you go.
out f curiousity, what would make nVidia better? I'll admit GeForce 6 was probably on the whole slightly better than radeon x at release with the two killer games being HL2 and DOOMIII(which had nearly double the performance on GeForce cards) but at this time, radeon x800s offer good enough performance in doomIII and are very solid performers overall, for the money I think this is hit straight on the head. and for the record, i've owned a radeon 9250, a GeForce 6200 PCI(using right now, it gets the job done) and a GeForce 7800GT(very solid card took almsot anything I threw at it just fine.) as it is right now, nVidia has to use two of their GPU cores just to compete with an x1950XT and even then at moderate resolutions(1280 or so) the x1950XT still pulls the win in many scenarios, its even worse when crossfire/SLi is applied as the GX2 doesn't scale quite as well simply due to the fact that ti's 4GPUs scaling vs. 2