GeForce 6800 replacing the lame FX - Page 3

wellard · 07-08-2004, 12:31 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Memnoch:
Hmm...what about my NVIDIA GeForce (2)MX/MX 400 32MB? Is it hopelessly outdated? It's only 2 years old or so -
If it is past it's UBD, can someone recommend a decent card that won't break the budget? I don't play that many FPS games, it's more RPGs, RTS and strategy games with some sport sims thrown in - I am planning to watch DVDs though once I get a DVD drive.

Same same Memnoch

I have the exact same card and the same wish to upgrade. My motherboard is a Aopen AK77pro with 4xAGP does this limit the video card replacements to something with only 4xAGP ? or can a 8x AGP card be used? (what does it mean anyway

)

So far I have seen a nVIDIA GeForce4 MX440SE 64MB DDR RAM in a local shop for $70. Will there be a reasonable jump in performance with this change?

[ 07-08-2004, 12:33 AM: Message edited by: wellard ]

Memnoch · 07-08-2004, 01:26 AM

You know what, Wellard? Go and download a diagnostic tool called SANDRA (from www.sisoftware.com) and it will tell you how "expandable" your motherboard is. I did it a few days ago and it's given me some very useful info - my m/board supports up to a 2GB P4 chip and 2GB of RDRAM - unfortunately the voltage is only rated at 1.75v and a lot of these cards are rated at 3v these days...

WOLFGIR · 07-08-2004, 04:32 AM

Personally after seeing the future prices here I bought myself a GF 5900 XT, 128 MB RAM.

The card it big, good meemory and has alot of the goody goody stuff for playing games, and a fair price at that.

I personally preferred my GF TI4200 rather then the sluggish 5200 MX card I had as well.

MOst important in a game for me is not ALL the eyecandy, it is that the graphics runs as fluid as possible with a minimum of glitches and troubles.

All I hope for now is that the new Bards Tale game will be as cool to play as it looks by the screenshots

I wonder.... have they met Yorrick perhaps??

Dundee Slaytern · 07-08-2004, 07:23 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Animal:
~~ To be honest, if your card is working great for the games you play today, hold off until it can't. Any card you buy today, will be outdated tommorrow.

Any hardware becomes outdated the moment you touch the receipt. [img]tongue.gif[/img]

Intrepid · 07-08-2004, 10:34 AM

I have a Radeon 9600LE with 256 DDR,
is a Radeon 9800 or 9800XT with 128 DDR really that much faster?
I mean, is it worth upgrading, and is there a noticible peformance difference between a 9600 and 9800

Anyway the Radeon 9600 is a major improvement over my Geforce 4 MX440 with 64 DDR, and it was reasonably cheap, so i am happy with it as a temporary upgrade, but the important question...

do you think it will run half life 2?

Bahamut · 07-09-2004, 10:49 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Dundee Slaytern:

quote:
Originally posted by Animal:
~~ To be honest, if your card is working great for the games you play today, hold off until it can't. Any card you buy today, will be outdated tommorrow.

Any hardware becomes outdated the moment you touch the receipt. [img]tongue.gif[/img] [/QUOTE]Actually, from the moment you start to think about it it's already outdated. [img]tongue.gif[/img]

Memnoch · 07-10-2004, 02:08 AM

Does anyone have any answers to the questions posted here?

Come on experts, where are you all.

Memnoch · 07-10-2004, 01:27 PM

Actually, I've been doing a bit of research and I haven't found anything lame about the FX...possibly it didn't meet NVIDIA's expectations, but given the price they're at now, particularly the FX5700 and 5900, they seem to be quite good cards for the money. And even the cheaper cards FX5500, FX5200 seem to be more than adequate for things like NWN gaming, RTS, TBS and watching DVDs etc.

I went to www.whirlpool.net.au (an OZ broadband site) to inquire about video cards and got told to buy nothing less than a Radeon 9800 or an FX5900, both going for at least $500 OZ. Considering that my CPU is "only" a P4 1.4Ghz it's probably going to be a waste of money for me to get a high-end card - besides, some of the blokes there sounded like the types that would spent $500 on a power cable.

In any case, I'm starting to narrow it down to a Radeon 9200 or 9600 or an FX5500 to 5700. Any comments/feedback?

Larry, I'm a bit concerned about your "lame" comment. Do you know something about these FX cards that I might need to know if I was planning to get one?

Animal · 07-10-2004, 02:35 PM

Okay, here goes...

The FX series of cards were bloated and under engineered. There is a lot of belief that nVidia rushed them to market because ATI was kicking their buts with the 9700 and 9500 series.

What you want to look for is memory bandwith, 256bits being better than 128. This is not to be confused with RAM. For example the 9600XT 256MB card uses 256MB of 128bit DDR. The 9800XT 256MB uses 256MB of 256bit DDR. So you may have one card with 128bit memory running at 500MHZ and another card with 256bit memory running at 400MHZ, but the 256bit will be a faster card because of the memory bandwith.

Next thing you'll need to look at is the number of rendering pipelines, again the more the better. The ATI 9600 uses 4 pipelines, where as the 9800 uses 8. The 9800 is a much faster card in games that uses programmable shaders or DX9 games because of the 4 extra pipelines.

The same principles work for nVidia, I just used ATI because I own an ATI 9800XT.

When nVidia first launched their FX series of cards they were terrible underperformers. They sounded like F-16's, took up 2 slots in your case because of the huge cooling fans needed. I'm sure things have changed by now, however, I still feel that the ATI is a better engineered card, has better picture quality and offers the best overall real world performance.

Having said that, nVidia drivers are much, much better than ATI, although ATI is picking up their socks in that department. Open GL support in ATI drivers, in my opinion, is subpar. NWN for example will perform much better on nVidia hardware then it will on ATI's, but that is the only issue I've personally encountered with ATI. It took my 2 months of tweaking to get NWN to run at a decent frame rate.

One last piece of advise. Most newer cards support the AGP 3.0 spec, or 8X AGP. Some AGP 3.0 cards will not perform well unless your motherboard specifically supports AGP 3.0. The voltage requirements for AGP3.0 and AGP2.0 are different, so make sure your motherboard will support the new card that you want.

I'd suggest that you narrow your decisions down to the 9600 or the 5700. Stay away from any SE variants of the cards and concentrate on the top end models for that line, ie the XT or Ultra.

Memnoch · 07-10-2004, 02:43 PM

Thanks for that, Animal...what's the difference with the SE and XT variants anyway? I noticed there's an LE variant for both the 9600 and the 5700 as well, as well as ones with NO suffix - is the difference with these incremental or are they significant?

Another thing...I noticed this message on a 9800SE on sale at eBay:

ATI R9800 SE GPU
"L"-shaped RAM layout - silver-coloured fan as standard
128mb of DDR RAM onboard, capable of AGP 8x
TV output - S/VHS and Composite cables included
DVI Output
SMOOTHVISION™ 2.1 & SMARTSHADER™ 2.1
* Fan & heatsink held on by pins, Zalman HP80a passive cooler will fit
* Requires power via HDD power connector (HDD power splitter included)
* Needs a decent PSU - 300w minimum, more is better

What does PSU mean and how do I find out what mine is?

[ 07-10-2004, 02:45 PM: Message edited by: Memnoch ]

07-08-2004, 01:26 AM	#22
Memnoch Ironworks Moderator Join Date: February 28, 2001 Location: Boston/Sydney Posts: 11,771	You know what, Wellard? Go and download a diagnostic tool called SANDRA (from www.sisoftware.com) and it will tell you how "expandable" your motherboard is. I did it a few days ago and it's given me some very useful info - my m/board supports up to a 2GB P4 chip and 2GB of RDRAM - unfortunately the voltage is only rated at 1.75v and a lot of these cards are rated at 3v these days... __________________

07-08-2004, 04:32 AM	#23
WOLFGIR Bastet - Egyptian Cat Goddess Join Date: March 1, 2001 Location: Sweden Age: 50 Posts: 3,450	Personally after seeing the future prices here I bought myself a GF 5900 XT, 128 MB RAM. The card it big, good meemory and has alot of the goody goody stuff for playing games, and a fair price at that. I personally preferred my GF TI4200 rather then the sluggish 5200 MX card I had as well. MOst important in a game for me is not ALL the eyecandy, it is that the graphics runs as fluid as possible with a minimum of glitches and troubles. All I hope for now is that the new Bards Tale game will be as cool to play as it looks by the screenshots I wonder.... have they met Yorrick perhaps?? __________________ Don´t eat the yellow snow

07-10-2004, 02:08 AM	#27
Memnoch Ironworks Moderator Join Date: February 28, 2001 Location: Boston/Sydney Posts: 11,771	Does anyone have any answers to the questions posted here? Come on experts, where are you all. __________________

07-10-2004, 01:27 PM	#28
Memnoch Ironworks Moderator Join Date: February 28, 2001 Location: Boston/Sydney Posts: 11,771	Actually, I've been doing a bit of research and I haven't found anything lame about the FX...possibly it didn't meet NVIDIA's expectations, but given the price they're at now, particularly the FX5700 and 5900, they seem to be quite good cards for the money. And even the cheaper cards FX5500, FX5200 seem to be more than adequate for things like NWN gaming, RTS, TBS and watching DVDs etc. I went to www.whirlpool.net.au (an OZ broadband site) to inquire about video cards and got told to buy nothing less than a Radeon 9800 or an FX5900, both going for at least $500 OZ. Considering that my CPU is "only" a P4 1.4Ghz it's probably going to be a waste of money for me to get a high-end card - besides, some of the blokes there sounded like the types that would spent $500 on a power cable. In any case, I'm starting to narrow it down to a Radeon 9200 or 9600 or an FX5500 to 5700. Any comments/feedback? Larry, I'm a bit concerned about your "lame" comment. Do you know something about these FX cards that I might need to know if I was planning to get one? __________________

07-10-2004, 02:35 PM	#29
Animal Gold Dragon Join Date: March 29, 2002 Location: Canada Age: 51 Posts: 2,534	Okay, here goes... The FX series of cards were bloated and under engineered. There is a lot of belief that nVidia rushed them to market because ATI was kicking their buts with the 9700 and 9500 series. What you want to look for is memory bandwith, 256bits being better than 128. This is not to be confused with RAM. For example the 9600XT 256MB card uses 256MB of 128bit DDR. The 9800XT 256MB uses 256MB of 256bit DDR. So you may have one card with 128bit memory running at 500MHZ and another card with 256bit memory running at 400MHZ, but the 256bit will be a faster card because of the memory bandwith. Next thing you'll need to look at is the number of rendering pipelines, again the more the better. The ATI 9600 uses 4 pipelines, where as the 9800 uses 8. The 9800 is a much faster card in games that uses programmable shaders or DX9 games because of the 4 extra pipelines. The same principles work for nVidia, I just used ATI because I own an ATI 9800XT. When nVidia first launched their FX series of cards they were terrible underperformers. They sounded like F-16's, took up 2 slots in your case because of the huge cooling fans needed. I'm sure things have changed by now, however, I still feel that the ATI is a better engineered card, has better picture quality and offers the best overall real world performance. Having said that, nVidia drivers are much, much better than ATI, although ATI is picking up their socks in that department. Open GL support in ATI drivers, in my opinion, is subpar. NWN for example will perform much better on nVidia hardware then it will on ATI's, but that is the only issue I've personally encountered with ATI. It took my 2 months of tweaking to get NWN to run at a decent frame rate. One last piece of advise. Most newer cards support the AGP 3.0 spec, or 8X AGP. Some AGP 3.0 cards will not perform well unless your motherboard specifically supports AGP 3.0. The voltage requirements for AGP3.0 and AGP2.0 are different, so make sure your motherboard will support the new card that you want. I'd suggest that you narrow your decisions down to the 9600 or the 5700. Stay away from any SE variants of the cards and concentrate on the top end models for that line, ie the XT or Ultra. __________________ It\'s all fun and games until somebody loses an eye...then it becomes a sport.<br /> [img]\"http://members.shaw.ca/mtholdings/bsmeter.gif\" alt=\" - \" />

07-08-2004, 10:34 AM	#25
Intrepid Symbol of Cyric Join Date: March 28, 2003 Location: Australia Age: 37 Posts: 1,124	I have a Radeon 9600LE with 256 DDR, is a Radeon 9800 or 9800XT with 128 DDR really that much faster? I mean, is it worth upgrading, and is there a noticible peformance difference between a 9600 and 9800 Anyway the Radeon 9600 is a major improvement over my Geforce 4 MX440 with 64 DDR, and it was reasonably cheap, so i am happy with it as a temporary upgrade, but the important question... do you think it will run half life 2?

07-10-2004, 02:43 PM	#30
Memnoch Ironworks Moderator Join Date: February 28, 2001 Location: Boston/Sydney Posts: 11,771	Thanks for that, Animal...what's the difference with the SE and XT variants anyway? I noticed there's an LE variant for both the 9600 and the 5700 as well, as well as ones with NO suffix - is the difference with these incremental or are they significant? Another thing...I noticed this message on a 9800SE on sale at eBay: ATI R9800 SE GPU "L"-shaped RAM layout - silver-coloured fan as standard 128mb of DDR RAM onboard, capable of AGP 8x TV output - S/VHS and Composite cables included DVI Output SMOOTHVISION™ 2.1 & SMARTSHADER™ 2.1 * Fan & heatsink held on by pins, Zalman HP80a passive cooler will fit * Requires power via HDD power connector (HDD power splitter included) * Needs a decent PSU - 300w minimum, more is better What does PSU mean and how do I find out what mine is? [ 07-10-2004, 02:45 PM: Message edited by: Memnoch ] __________________

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