HELP PLEASE 9600 or 9800?

[paco taco mike]

I will be buying a Dual 1.8 g5 but :
should i upgrade the ram to 1 gig w/ a radeon 9600
or
should i upgrade the video card to the 9800 w/ 512 ram

please help!
btw i am planning on playing World of Warcraft

-mike

[musicpyrite]

What will you be doing with this computer?

[mattmack]

I will be buying a Dual 1.8 g5 but :
should i upgrade the ram to 1 gig w/ a radeon 9600
or
should i upgrade the video card to the 9800 w/ 512 ram

please help!
btw i am planning on playing World of Warcraft

-mike
Personaly I feel the 9800 is a signifagantly better card than the 9600 and a hell of a lot better than the stock 5200. You can find inexpensive ram any where and you also might look into purchasing the card seperatly as well. I have not compared the upgrade price to a commercially available product, but it is worth a look. Ultimately get the 9800 and buy the ram from somewhere besides apple

[absolut_mac]

I will be buying a Dual 1.8 g5 but :
should i upgrade the ram to 1 gig w/ a radeon 9600
or
should i upgrade the video card to the 9800 w/ 512 ram

please help!
btw i am planning on playing World of Warcraft

-mike

If games are important to you, then you'll be very happy with the 9800. Not only can you get RAM for much less than what Apple charges, but if funds are tight now, you can always add extra RAM later.

[paco taco mike]

Thanks guys.
-mike

[cluthz]

Get the 9600xt, sell it for 100 get a X800 for 300...

[Soulstorm]

btw i am planning on playing World of Warcraft
-mike

Seems to me that some have missed this detail.... Look, if you are going to play WOW you will need as much memory as possible. I don't know if 512 MBytes are enough for that.

I have 9600XT and works surprisingly fine for all my games, even with UT2004.

[Hoef]

Get the 9600xt, sell it for 100 get a X800 for 300...

X800 for $300? Nice .... Where is that? Cheapest I could find is $480 (thus $380 if you are able to sell the 9600), and that is ex Tax and shipping.

[Eevee]

X800 for $300? Nice .... Where is that? Cheapest I could find is $480 (thus $380 if you are able to sell the 9600), and that is ex Tax and shipping.

Where can you get X800 for $300? I'm interested. And I agree that more memory is better, and you don't have to buy it from Apple!

[Converted2Truth]

I got my X800 XT for 408 shipped. 300 is crazy low.

But i agree. Don't get the 9800 bto from apple. the card is overpriced as an upgrade, and I don't think it would make you happy. The X800 will make u happy! I've got a dual 1.8 too (pci-x version). get the stock vcard with the mac, then upgrade.

[benpatient]

ugh.

you guys aren't necessarily looking at this the correct way.

how much does apple charge for the 9600 BTO option? $50

and how much for the 9800 BTO? $350

and how much for the upgrade to 512MB? $75

and how much for the upgrade to 1 GB? $225


Just to show you how some of those options are and are not reasonable.

a PC 9600 128 costs now about 100 dollars.

a 9800 pro is about 200-250 dollars depending on where you look.

it doesn't make sense to pay for ANY of apple's memory upgrades unless you want to go for a LOT of RAM, which you don't need because it has diminishing returns for almost every common use. Unless you deal with huge databases or truly huge photoshop documents, you probably won't benefit from more than 1.5 GB of RAM, and thus, you don't need to "upgrade" the base 256mb pair that apple gives you with apple RAM. You can just buy a couple of 512 MB or 256 MB PC3200 chips at considerably less cost, and have either 768MB or 1.25GB...either way, it will be enough for most things.

My personal recommendations:

get the 9600 for 50 dollars because the 5200 isn't worth a dollar in my personal experience.

not one dollar!

aside from that, don't buy anything from apple. Get 3rd party PC3200 RAM of a good quality that will work with a G5...I would say for your uses, get 2x256...you could go with 2x512 if you want, but I would say that you'll be fine with a total of 768, and if not, you can replace the two 128MB chips later and have 1.5GB.

I would also recommend that you buy another 80GB HDD from a third party. Get a Seagate 7200 RPM 8MB buffer SATA OEM hard drive and then run the apple hardware utility to get it running in a RAID 0 array. You'll have 1 really fast virtual 160gb HDD for less than the cost of "upgrading" from 80 to 160GB on the apple store site.

That's the way to go, i think. Spending a bunch of money on last-year's hardware (9800 pro for basically 400 dollars!?!?) isn't a good idea. The 9600 is almost 2x the speed of the 5200. The 9800 is maybe 2x again that speed. But it is 7x the price...not quite a "deal" or "cost effective" especially when there are MUCH faster cards out there now...even if they aren't all available on the mac yet.

So, to summarize:

9600 BTO from apple
3rd party 2x256MB RAM
3rd party Seagate 80GB HDD to create 160GB RAID 0 array.

total added expense from the base 1999 cost: 225-300 dollars depending on where you buy and what brand of RAM you go with.

[paco taco mike]

ugh.

you guys aren't necessarily looking at this the correct way.

how much does apple charge for the 9600 BTO option? $50

and how much for the 9800 BTO? $350

and how much for the upgrade to 512MB? $75

and how much for the upgrade to 1 GB? $225


Just to show you how some of those options are and are not reasonable.

a PC 9600 128 costs now about 100 dollars.

a 9800 pro is about 200-250 dollars depending on where you look.

it doesn't make sense to pay for ANY of apple's memory upgrades unless you want to go for a LOT of RAM, which you don't need because it has diminishing returns for almost every common use. Unless you deal with huge databases or truly huge photoshop documents, you probably won't benefit from more than 1.5 GB of RAM, and thus, you don't need to "upgrade" the base 256mb pair that apple gives you with apple RAM. You can just buy a couple of 512 MB or 256 MB PC3200 chips at considerably less cost, and have either 768MB or 1.25GB...either way, it will be enough for most things.

My personal recommendations:

get the 9600 for 50 dollars because the 5200 isn't worth a dollar in my personal experience.

not one dollar!

aside from that, don't buy anything from apple. Get 3rd party PC3200 RAM of a good quality that will work with a G5...I would say for your uses, get 2x256...you could go with 2x512 if you want, but I would say that you'll be fine with a total of 768, and if not, you can replace the two 128MB chips later and have 1.5GB.

I would also recommend that you buy another 80GB HDD from a third party. Get a Seagate 7200 RPM 8MB buffer SATA OEM hard drive and then run the apple hardware utility to get it running in a RAID 0 array. You'll have 1 really fast virtual 160gb HDD for less than the cost of "upgrading" from 80 to 160GB on the apple store site.

That's the way to go, i think. Spending a bunch of money on last-year's hardware (9800 pro for basically 400 dollars!?!?) isn't a good idea. The 9600 is almost 2x the speed of the 5200. The 9800 is maybe 2x again that speed. But it is 7x the price...not quite a "deal" or "cost effective" especially when there are MUCH faster cards out there now...even if they aren't all available on the mac yet.

So, to summarize:

9600 BTO from apple
3rd party 2x256MB RAM
3rd party Seagate 80GB HDD to create 160GB RAID 0 array.

total added expense from the base 1999 cost: 225-300 dollars depending on where you buy and what brand of RAM you go with.

thanks, i took your advice and actually saved. my next paycheck will be going towards the x800.

thanks again for everyones input.

-mike

[cluthz]

X800 for $300? Nice .... Where is that? Cheapest I could find is $480 (thus $380 if you are able to sell the 9600), and that is ex Tax and shipping.


I think my post was a bit unclear.

You can get a x800 for 400. (converted2truth found one for 408 incl shipping)
400 minus the price you'll got from the 9600xt is ~300..
300 is what you'll pay for the 9800 from apple. ;)

[ChrisFromCanada]

Ok so converted2truth then would you mind telling us where you got it for $408?