ATI gfx cards
 

Recently, I was given a Radeon 9550 Pro 256mb card, which I realize is a scaled down version of the 9600 series (having a core speed of 250MHz instead of 400). Looking on newegg, I see a 9600 Pro 256mb cards for less than the 9550, however they are manufactured by companies other than ATI, such as Sapphire, Powercolor, and Info-tech. Now I pose the question to you: Should I send this 9550 back (it came from newegg) and get one of these cheaper, faster cards, or should I not buy vid cards from 3rd party manufacturers?

The cards are all the same (chipset-wise), just licensed to be made by different manufacturers rather than ATI. I don't know how much a 9600 is, but if you can, you might want to get the NVIDIA GeForce 6600GT for about $200. Its the best performing "budget" card out there.

If I remember correctly the 9550 pro rates between the 9600 Pro and XT but I could be wrong.

whiplash I believe you're talking about the Radeon 9500 pro, which rates between the 9600 pro and 9600 XT, and coincidentally has nothign to do with the 9550. Nice naming conventions ATI. The radeon 9550 is actually lower than all of those, more like a suped up 9200 Pro i believe. I would certainly return it for the cheaper 9600 Pro. The sapphire cards are actually the same cards ATI uses as the "ati" brand. If you can get one of those the only difference is the box.

totaly off topic, what do you guys think about the new PCIexpress? how much faster than AGP is it?

Marginally as of right now. My next computer will probably have one since that is where we are going from AGP, and SLI is just too cool.

SLI? whats that~

SLI = two PCI-X video cards running at the same time. One card renders the top half of the display, the other card does the bottom half. Pretty damned cool.