is Nvidia 9600MGT 1GB better than 512mb?

Hi I'm slowly narrowing down where to buy my Acer Aspire 6930G from and have found it reasonably priced at Comet, there is only one thing, the graphics card instead of being the Nvidia 9600M GT 512mb is the Nvidia 9600M GT 1Gb, at first glance I thought this was great but I have a feeling I've read somewhere that this card is not as good or the memory is not as accesible??

Just wondering if this card is better, worse or the same?

Cheers

 

if they are both gddr3 or both gddr2 it will be virtually the same, a 9600m gt cant use all of even 512 mb, but more ram is slightly better, you'll see about a 1 fps difference. maybe 2

 

I don't know about a FPS difference, but you should be able to put details up higher.

 

It wont really matter

 

Given the bus size, 128-bit, not even 512mb are fully used.

Edit: Upsss... corrected to 128-bit.

 

128-bit.

512 and 1024MB can be used, but it's not practical*. If it's the same price and they're both DDR2, I'd still get the 1024MB.

 

Well honestly it matters little... Games which would benefit from 1Gb of VRAM are probably out of the 9600M GT's performance levels if not near the edge of it.

As people have said, pick the one with GDDR3 memory(don't quote me on this, but I think both machines have it) or the one that pleases you most comparing to other specs. Considering they're the same machine(right?), pick the cheapest one basically.

 

With a size like 1GB, and considering it scores 4,275 in 3DMark06 ( http://www.laptopmag.com/review/laptops/acer-aspire-6930g-6723.aspx?page=2 ), it's probably DDR2.

 

Thanks very much for the advice, I rang them up and they don't know what type of memory it is but to be honest it seems like a pretty good deal either way Thanks again!

 

Agreed.
Because 9600M GT is a 128bit BUS WIDTH GPU(2nd class). Thus, it can't fully utilise 512MB of RAM or 1GB of RAM. Yet, it is better to have higher RAM, you will gain about 1-3FPS for 1GB of RAM 9600M GT.

Well, 9600M GT have both DDR 3 and DDR 2 versions.
DDR 3 version has better performance compared to the DDR 2 version.
1000-1500points different in 3Dmark06, DDR3 vs DDR2.

 

Depends on the native res, in full 1080p, Thats when it really has the extra memory used, but it really depends on speeds and games.

I think..LOL

 

512MB is usually GDDR3 and hence better than 1GB, which is usually DDR2.

 

For notebooks, rule of thumb, without getting into details, is that except for the highest end cards, 512MB is more than adequate. Even for higher end cards 1024MB is pretty much a waste. Speed of RAM is king! Go GDDR3 @ 512MB over DDR2 @ 1024MB any day.

 

Speed of RAM = Memory Clock of a GPU
DDR3 has faster speed than DDR2.
The amount of RAM is crap. Speed of RAM hold the key of performance.

 

As stated above

It is the speed of the memory (DDR3/2) that is more important than the amount of memory

Even more so for mid-range cards