GeForce 9600 GSO / ATI Radeon HD3850

[Alejandro Nova]

Greetings.

I need your help. I have an outdated GeForceFX 5500, with a first-gen Sempron 2500 (the slowest processor capable of AMD64), and I bought a Core 2 Duo mobo and processor, to upgrade my PC. But... I crazed myself with the mobo I was getting (Asus P5WD2), and forgot that Intel Extreme chipsets don't have integrated video. The old GeForceFX is AGP, and this beauty of mobo has only two beautiful PCI Express 16x lanes waiting for some Crossfire. So, I'm left without a video card suitable for the system.

SLI or Crossfire is not an important factor to me, to consider. I'm not a gamer, but I'm an enthusiast Linux user, and I DO CARE about Linux compatibility. So, two video cards are within my economic range, the GeForce 9600 GSO, and the ATI Radeon HD 3850, and I've come here to ask you, fellow community of Phoronix, which one should I buy? Which one is the card that works better in Linux? I'm using Fedora 9 with KDE 4.1. I'm willing to switch my distro, if that is required, but I am NOT willing to give up on KDE 4.1.

I've heard that nVidia is fixing their issues with KDE 4.1 performance. ATI suffers from some bugs with Wine, and console switching. And, how is the libre support for the HD 3850? In summary, which one should I buy?

[Kano]

Go for 8800 GTS 512 or 9800 GTX, these cards are more powerfull. Especially the first is pretty cheap sometimes.