<p>TI 89 they say, but it's way too expensive for me....Any other recommendation ?</p>
<p>The Ti-89 is like $20 more than the Ti-84, which is the gold standard of high school calculators. What’s your budget?</p>
<p>the TI-89 isn’t really much help in the SAT math since the concepts tested in the SAT are pretty basic stuff. It might help somewhat on the math SAT II tests but it really is only significantly more helpful for the AP Calculus tests.</p>
<p>I would recommend the TI-83 as it has the exact same interface and capabilities as the TI-84. The major advantage the 84 has over the 83 is that it is faster, which only comes into play if you are doing high level math (e.g. graphing the derivative of a really complex function, or running a riemann sum approximation program with a lot of partitions)</p>
<p>The TI-89 helps a lot for just about any algebra problem, mainly because it saves a lot of time.</p>
<p>^As someone who doesn’t have a TI-89 and has only talked to other people who have used one I’m curious how much time it actually saves. Could you elaborate on what it is able to do significantly faster.</p>
<p>Your mind. Seriously. Even with the most expensive up-to-date calculator you can get the answer wrong. That is why the SAT exists. It wants to know if you can think beyond the numbers and into the actual problem.</p>