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Video Cards... [message #87875] Sun, 16 May 2004 08:42 Go to next message
SuperFlyingEngi is currently offline  SuperFlyingEngi
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I'm looking in to buying a video card, when I thought: Where better to seek help on important topics than the Renegade forums! So, if anyone has prior knowledge about video cards, could they please tell me if this looks like a good choice?

http://www.str8buy.com/chagemx4xagp.html


"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." -- Theodore Roosevelt (1918)

"The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect "domestic security." Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent. --U.S. Supreme Court decision (407 U.S. 297 (1972)

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Video Cards... [message #87887] Sun, 16 May 2004 09:39 Go to previous messageGo to next message
mrpirate is currently offline  mrpirate
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My advice would be to avoid anything made ATI with "SE" on the end. The Radeon 9800 SE features 4 rendering pipelines and a 128-bit memory bus, while the Radeon 9800 features 8 rendering pipelines and a 256-bit memory bus. It is possible to enable the unused pipelines, but it'd be a lot simpler just to buy a 9800 non-Pro.
Video Cards... [message #87888] Sun, 16 May 2004 09:50 Go to previous messageGo to next message
SuperFlyingEngi is currently offline  SuperFlyingEngi
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http://store.yahoo.com/komusa/giatira9812a.html

There, I think I actually found a worthy one. Too bad I can't play as cheap as I wanted to...

Thanks for the help mrpirate.


"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." -- Theodore Roosevelt (1918)

"The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect "domestic security." Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent. --U.S. Supreme Court decision (407 U.S. 297 (1972)

The Liberal Media At Work
An objective look at media partisanship
Video Cards... [message #87893] Sun, 16 May 2004 10:03 Go to previous messageGo to next message
SS217
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Wait for PCI express.

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Video Cards... [message #87898] Sun, 16 May 2004 10:24 Go to previous messageGo to next message
JadenStriker is currently offline  JadenStriker
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If your willing to push the effort I would wait for the PCI express like SS217 says. It is going to totally blow what we have now out of the water. I would highly recomend against paying 150 for any thing video card related. Maybe if it was 6 months ago, but not now, not when PCI express is less then a year away, if not 6 months from now.

I would wait and save up a bundle and get the KA stuff when it comes out. It maybe a bit of a small wait, but when 1xPCI express is compairable to an AGP slot and will allow you to use a 1GHz NIC card fully, you may regreat getting any thing concidered really good at this time. Maybe something cheap that will get you by, but the stuff coming out soon is going to blow our current computers away.
Video Cards... [message #87902] Sun, 16 May 2004 11:09 Go to previous messageGo to next message
mrpirate is currently offline  mrpirate
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PCI Express is not going to be the revelation you make it out to be--at least not for a while after it's released. The difference in performance between 8x AGP and 4x AGP is about 2-5%. PCI Express is going to be the same way to 8x AGP. The video cards that are going to be using PCI-Express initially will be the Radeon X800 and the GeForce 6800, which already exist in AGP form, and would show little performance benefit from the new technology.

The 9800 will be a great card to use until PCI Express becomes the norm in a few years, at which point upgrading would make a lot more sense.
Video Cards... [message #87919] Sun, 16 May 2004 12:28 Go to previous messageGo to next message
SuperFlyingEngi is currently offline  SuperFlyingEngi
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Just out of curiosity, is there really a huge performance difference between, say, a Radeon 9800 and a Geforce 2 MX 440, and a Radeon 9800 and a Radeon 9500? My computer really needs an upgrade and I'm trying to stay under $150 for a graphics, card, although if necessary I'll go up to $190 for a 9800. But I can't find any benchmarks or anything on the internet showing what the benefits of upgrading a card are. Could someone please enlighten me on this?

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." -- Theodore Roosevelt (1918)

"The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect "domestic security." Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent. --U.S. Supreme Court decision (407 U.S. 297 (1972)

The Liberal Media At Work
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Video Cards... [message #87927] Sun, 16 May 2004 12:58 Go to previous messageGo to next message
sum41freaky is currently offline  sum41freaky
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i have redeon 9800 XXL and its pretty good
i only dont know what it costs because it was in my pc when i bought it
Video Cards... [message #87928] Sun, 16 May 2004 13:06 Go to previous messageGo to next message
revenuke is currently offline  revenuke
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i suggest you wait a couple of months for the new latest cards to arrive, then the prices for 9800/5900 will drop.

you say whats the difference between geforce 2 mmx and 9800... hmm well... its like saying whats the difference between white and black..

Click here for the list of all graphics card performances


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Video Cards... [message #87930] Sun, 16 May 2004 13:07 Go to previous messageGo to next message
revenuke is currently offline  revenuke
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sum41freaky

i have redeon 9800 XXL

u mean XT....


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Video Cards... [message #87933] Sun, 16 May 2004 13:30 Go to previous messageGo to next message
JadenStriker is currently offline  JadenStriker
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When a company makes something to last for the next 10 years it is not going to make it cheap, so it is not going to be just like an 8xAGP slot. AGP slots only allow 25 watts of power through their connections any ways, and the video card companies need more, thats why a lot of AGP slot have a seporet power connector. PCI Express x16 allows for 60 watts. Thats a lot of power to work with, to use as data and turn into speed.

Intel is not going to revolutionise the PCI bus for the next 10 years if it is as slow as AGPx8, nor will you be able to get the full ability of a 1GHz NIC card on the old PCI bus we have now, and I really doubt we are getting our moneys worth from 100Mhz NIC card any ways because most PCI now days is 66MHz at tops, maybe 133 if you have one of AMDs 64 bit boards, and even their PCI buses are not good enough to get the power of a 1GHz NIC, they make those on-board instead because they can't.
Video Cards... [message #87950] Sun, 16 May 2004 14:28 Go to previous messageGo to next message
mrpirate is currently offline  mrpirate
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Even with PCI Express, high-end video cards will still need separate power connections.

All PCI Express lets the video card do is communicate with the rest of the system faster, and since we may this summer/fall see cards with 512 MB of memory on them, that becomes less and less of an issue.
Video Cards... [message #87957] Sun, 16 May 2004 14:45 Go to previous messageGo to next message
JadenStriker is currently offline  JadenStriker
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Yes it does let it communicate with the system faster, and that is where most of the bottle necks are a lot of times. As far as still using seporet power connections, if they want to pull 65 Watts or more, then your are right, because there will comne a time where ATI and Nivida will want or need more power to preform better.
Video Cards... [message #87959] Sun, 16 May 2004 14:54 Go to previous messageGo to next message
mrpirate is currently offline  mrpirate
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All current high-end video cards use way more than 65 W. The bottleneck on the R420 is its memory bandwidth, not the AGP connection.
Video Cards... [message #87979] Sun, 16 May 2004 16:25 Go to previous messageGo to next message
SuperFlyingEngi is currently offline  SuperFlyingEngi
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One last question - If I have a Dell 4300 with a 1.6 GHz processor and reasonable other stuff, will I just be able to swap out my Geforce2 MX 440 and plug in a Radeon 9800 and will it just go faster, or is speed very dependent on how fast your processor is?

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." -- Theodore Roosevelt (1918)

"The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect "domestic security." Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent. --U.S. Supreme Court decision (407 U.S. 297 (1972)

The Liberal Media At Work
An objective look at media partisanship
Video Cards... [message #87983] Sun, 16 May 2004 16:34 Go to previous messageGo to next message
HaZarD26 is currently offline  HaZarD26
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For rendering, video card is the dependant variable. Surfing the web, encoding, loading speeds, etc. are CPU/RAM dependant.

-HaZ-
Video Cards... [message #87985] Sun, 16 May 2004 16:39 Go to previous messageGo to next message
mrpirate is currently offline  mrpirate
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You should be able to no problem, although your motherboard may only support AGP 4x. However, like I said, that doesn't make much difference. The only problem I can forsee is your PSU. Make sure you have a power supply of 300 W or more, or, upon installing your 9800, it make self-destruct, taking the rest of your computer with it.

As to the 1.6 GHz CPU: I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume you've got a P4 1.6A, or the original Northwood. Anyway, it may provide a slight bottleneck in some games, but you can easily counter that by scaling down the physics/world detail settings. All the things that really contribute to the visual aspect of games (i.e. textures, resolution, AA + AF, etc.) are video card-dependent. Get ready to be shocked, after playing on a GeForce 2 MX.
Video Cards... [message #87987] Sun, 16 May 2004 16:47 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Aircraftkiller is currently offline  Aircraftkiller
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The processor will still limit his speed in-game. I had a 1.2 GHz with a GeForce 4 Ti4200, with 640 MB of SDRAM, and all I could normally get was 20-30 FPS at most.

With the new system I have, a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4, 256 333 MHz DDR SDRAM, and a GeForce FX 5200, I get an average of 50-72 FPS each game. It's usually 60-70.
Video Cards... [message #87990] Sun, 16 May 2004 16:53 Go to previous messageGo to next message
mrpirate is currently offline  mrpirate
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It depends. SDRAM vs. DDR makes a huge difference. I originally had 768 MB SDRAM with my P4 2.4A, and averaged 25-30 FPS. Last spring, I upgraded to a new motherboard that supported 400 MHz DDR and saw my average FPS jump to 45-50. That was with a Radeon 9000 Pro. In August of 2003, I got a Radeon 9600 Pro and now I average 50-60 FPS a game, at 1024x768 with 4xAA and 8xAF.

If he's got DDR, there should be no problem. If he's got SDRAM, this may be an exercise in futility, since 20 FPS is still 20 FPS, even at 1600x1200 with 6xAA and 16xAF. That is, it wouldn't be worth getting a 9800. A 9600 Pro would suffice in that situation.
Video Cards... [message #87997] Sun, 16 May 2004 17:19 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Deth7 is currently offline  Deth7
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GForce FX's are very good.

Video Cards... [message #88013] Sun, 16 May 2004 17:56 Go to previous messageGo to next message
JadenStriker is currently offline  JadenStriker
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Hum, I'm not so sure about the watt's.

This may help a bit mrpirate.

http://www.jscustompcs.com/power_supply/

I didn't think I was using all 350 watts on my PC.

I have the following
P4 850e chipset 2.26GHz
Radeon 9800 pro
4 sticks of 256MB RAMBUS 800mhz ram
1 Hard drive
DVD-Drive
CD-R-RW
Sound Blaster Live no frontbay
2 USB Divices
4 80mm fans

My total watts needed is 337W.

And the video card doesn't take 60 watts; well not yet any ways. I hear an overclock!

The AGP slot only supplies 25 normaly of those watts. If the Radeon 9800 pro was a PCI Express card, it would not need an extra power connection. Since a Radeon 9000 takes 30 watts and doesn't need an extra power connection, I guess the AGP slot can handle more then 25 watts though.
Video Cards... [message #88021] Sun, 16 May 2004 18:37 Go to previous messageGo to next message
mrpirate is currently offline  mrpirate
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The GeForce FX line was mostly a flop.
Video Cards... [message #88056] Mon, 17 May 2004 01:11 Go to previous message
revenuke is currently offline  revenuke
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just avoid 64 bit fx5200 at all cost!

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