9600 Pro 128mb vs 9600 256mb

[Hieremias]

I'm in the market for a new system, and I have a video card question. At the store I usually deal with they have the following two cards that I'm interested in:

Sapphire Radeon 9600 Pro 128mb DDR - $220 CDN
Sapphire Radeon 9600 256mb DDR - $197 CDN

You see that the Pro version has half as much memory but is slightly more expensive. So which should I get? Are the benefits of the Pro version worth more than the extra 128mb of video RAM?

[Suicides-by-Steve]

<div class=\"smallfont\">I'm in the market for a new system, and I have a video card question. At the store I usually deal with they have the following two cards that I'm interested in:

Sapphire Radeon 9600 Pro 128mb DDR - $220 CDN
Sapphire Radeon 9600 256mb DDR - $197 CDN

You see that the Pro version has half as much memory but is slightly more expensive. So which should I get? Are the benefits of the Pro version worth more than the extra 128mb of video RAM?</div>

I don't know much about the two, but in my meanderings about the web, I have found alot of people like the PRO versions of the ATi cards rather than the non-Pro. What are the differences? If you tell me some of the features that the Pro version has, I can fill you in a bit.

[Renzatic Gear]

This is an easy question to answer, the pro card is FAR faster so you should go with it despite the fact that it only has half the memory. As of right now the 256 meg cards are good for bragging rights but not much else..you won't see any difference between 128 and 256 megs for a couple of years at least so you might as well get the faster card.

[Eddie]

Yes, get the Pro card.

The 9600 Pro card is going to be significantly faster than any 9600 non-pro, whether the non-pro has more memory or not because the core/mem speed of the any Pro is higher than any non-pro regardless of the memory capacity.

And 256MB for any 9600-class card is overkill too.