Graphics BFG 5900XT vs 9800 Pro

I don't plan on doing any overclocking. The BFG has better clock and core speeds than the 9800 pro, but other than that they are pretty much the same. Which one would I be better off with? I know people tend to lean towards Ati in these comparisons for whatever reason. Remember, I don't think I want to oc anything, except maybe some tweaking with powerstrip. (everything I touch tends to break so I don't want to go too far )

 

IMHO Powerstrip is among the poorest tools out there. Anyway in raw perf the 9800Pro and FX5900ULTRA are very close but the 9800Pro ...

* IS CHEAPER!
* Is more consistently fast.
* Has better IQ.
* Has better and faster AA+AF.
* Is a tad smaller, cooler and a little less power hungry (all small points but still).

IMHO it would take an FX5950ULTRA for at least the same money to make it even worth considering over the 9800Pro. None of these are bad cards and the GF-FX cards do have better OpenGL and esp Linux drivers. However IMHO the 9800Pro is easily the better choice, esp if you're talking the FX5900XT which is slower than the nonUltra which in turn is slower than the FX5900ULTRA.

 

NVIDIA's AF is actually superior to ATI's, but I won't get into that here

the R3x0's FSAA is considerably better than the GeForce FX's though because it uses rotated-grid Anti-Aliasing rather than the two-by-two grid pattern that is used on the GeForce FX. The GeForce 6 series uses RGAA much like ATI's R3x0 architecture.

More on how this works here: http://bit-tech.net/feature/52/2