Video Card Thread (Mostly Gecube x1950xt)

Abuzar: The 9600GT is £125 in the UK, versus £125 for the 512MB HD3850, and £110 for the 256MB version. I'd say that still makes it a good deal.
Kardson: nice one! Whether or not you waited for the 9000, you've got a brilliant system either way, and if you can get the drivers for your 3870 working well, you'll still find it an awesome card.

 

Actually,

I haven't had a MAJOR problem yet with the drivers. Mind you I am Running 64bit Vista as well.

Games installed and played error free so far.
World Of Warcraft
Crysis
Battlefield 2 + all addons
Call of Duty 4
World in Conflict (can not get dual monitor support to work)
Command and Conquer 3
Half Life 2 / Counter Strike Source / Team Fortress 2
S.T.A.L.K.E.R Shadow of Chernobyl
Tabula Rasa ( Wierd Shadow problem if set to ultimate video settings)
Frontlines: Fuel of War Beta

My HD3870 brand is VISIONTEK
Video Driver 7.14.10.0555
Using bios version VER010.073.000.000.027243
Running at 810mhz GPU and 1170mhz MEM

The only game that I cannot run @ Max settings will 30+ steady framerate is Crysis.
If I turn the Shader level down 1 it is more than playable without any hitches.

I do miss ATI TRAY TOOLS though..

 

for 1680x1050 and under the 9600GT is superb, esp for its price (£117 OcUK)

It clocks like MAD, and comes close to 3870 performance, and beating sometimes. esp when you OC.

the thing is most are around £125, and you can find far superior 8800GTs for about £140.

the pricing is just to close, unless you buy the reference ones.

BUT then again some come with a lot of good connections like display port, HMDI (with sound) etc. good power, and good for HTPCs.

BTW, have you lot heard about the 9800GT, its an 8800GT, but with a Tri-SLI connector.

WELL DONE Nvidia. (!)

ANOTHER rebadge using a two year old architecture...as is the 9800GX2. (a down clocked dual G92 GTS)

yes i have to say the same about ATI aswell with the 3870 being a rebadged x2900XT. but, atleast it was a 2007 year tech, rebadged in 2007.

if they ati ad nvidia dont release NEW cards (with brand new architectures) this year, itll be 3 years since we had NEW GPUs.

 

Well its not THAT much slower than a 8800GT.

 

well the 3870 was much slower, and this is just under (on average) 3870 performance.

 

holy sh!t

an unbrabded 9600GT for £106

http://www.cclonline.com/product-in...y_id=681&manufacturer_id=0&tid=cclvalue9600gt

or a branded (zotac / sparkle) one (v.good companies) for £112

http://www.cclonline.com/product-listings.asp?category_id=681

now that is worth it. infact i probably wont be recomending a mid range ATI anymore

 

There goes my 3850 recommendation... 9600GT FTW!

 

The 9600GT is certainly a very tasty card. Given that it has the same reference design as the 8800GT, it'll probably fit the HR-03GT too.

 

Heres a review for you *now 9600* guys.

http://www.legionhardware.com/document.php?id=724&p=0

 

Looks like the 9600 is on a par with the HD3850 if you use DX9 and no AA, and beats the 3870 by 10-15% if you do use either, typical nvidia really. I do use AA, but don't use DX10 for obvious reasons, and the only reason I use AA so much is because I like having crisp, perfect images. AA or not, that's not something I'm going to get with an nvidia card. Back when it was 8800s or an X1900, it was pointless to go with the ATi for obvious reasons, but now that the performance gap isn't huge, the only reason that I'd ever not consider ATI would be the horrific drivers, and nvidia's aren't exactly perfect.
Funnily enough, I still remain in the ATI camp at this time, even though I expect I'm probably the only person still to do so.

 

Hey guys!

I've been trying to work and get going in real estate. However, I did buy COD4, and Battlefield 2.

I can run COD4 on medium settings on my x850xtpe, and I can run Battlefield 2 on medium settings. I'm still using my P4 3.2 with 1gig memory.

On BF2, I am watching the frames, trying to keep at least 30 fps of course, and I just moved from 1024 x 768 up to 1280 x 960 (I can run 1600 x 1200 on the demo version, but the full version seems to tax my system more) and the problem I have is that after playing for an hour or so, I start to experience temporary delays lasting several seconds - temporary freezes. For example, I can't pilot a helicopter. With the freezes, I will be going along great, I'll get a freeze, and then of course crash the helicopter.

I googled the problem just now and one guy said that he experienced this problem with BF2 and an x850xtpe, when he had under 2gigs memory - he said the system is paging memory in and out of the hard disk, because BF2 requires more than 1 gig memory. Does that sound right to you guys?

Waymon, thanks Ray, for the link about vista and the 3850 - I remember reading something like that - it's a matter of the card's id code or something like that - I think I read that the omega drivers don't have that problem. Anyway, I don't plan to get vista for a while, or maybe never. I just talked to my old friend Mo, the PC builder, and he said that Dell was forced to start shipping systems with XP to its corporate customers, because they were all complaining about the bugs in Vista. Mo says "Vista is junk." What do you guys say?

BTW, that 5848 3dmarks is exactly what I am talking about. Remember, I'm at 2260 right now. That kind of score would be awesome for me. No, not the 20k you racked up, or the 14k you get every day, but for me, like Travis said one time, EYE CANDY!! Hey, the guy was using a P4 at 3.8?? I didn't know a p4 went that fast - mine is 3.2 and I thought that was the fastest. Did he have it overclocked?

Sam, you went and rained on my parade. The resolution was skewed in the 3dmarks. Well, still, I have to say that mid 4000 is about what I was hoping for. I remember that all of you dudes were getting mid 4000s with the gecube, so that's about what I was hoping for - still way up from my 2260, and it's only $220, and I don't need a new psu! One last thing - a dude in another forum said "If you are worried about a bottleneck, pair it with a $100 PhysX card - on my p4 3.2 I can play COD4 maxed!" What do you think about that Sam, and if I were to try that, would I again be underpowered psu-wise with only 20 amps on the 12volt rail. I am thinking the 3850 can slip right in and won't use any more power than my x850xtpe, but to add another card????

Sam, I'm with you, I'm still in the ATI camp. You got me with Ray's beach picture comparisons. If you're gonna go for the eye candy, why not be a bit of a perfectionist and go for the best picture.

Kardson! Travis, you're back!! The gecube is collecting dust waiting for your little boy's future machine. Did your little girl ever get her cast off her leg? How's the wifey! Speaking of wifey, how did you ever slip a whole new system past her and get away with it. I thought you were going the asroc route - take along the gecube and get dual core. Now you're all the way to quad core, 4 gigs, 3870. So, when you say it screams, give us a 3dmark6 number - cmon!

Abuzar, ok it's not persian. All right, how about Turkish? Let's see,

So, who speaks urdu? Urdu is not arabian, right? It's not persian. So, are you Afghani - no they speak Persian. Are you Iraqi? All right, that's two guesses, Turkish or Iraqi. Am I still wrong?

Dinc, thanks for reviving the thread when you did. Otherwise, where would I hang out? Oh, yeah, I'm supposed to not be hanging out, I'm supposed to be selling houses. Oh well.

-Rich

 

harvrdguy,

heya. Daughter is good, cast is off and she's walking.. well running now.

I was able to sneak the pieces into my system without the wifey knowing. Basically I took my old rig to a lan party at some co workers and installed the stuff there. Which I had hidden in the tire compartment of my car... Good thing I didn't get a flat LOL.

I tried using the gecube card in his system yesterday. I took out the peltier cooler as his PSU is a little weak for it. 480watts... but more importantly it only had 4 molex connectors in the damn thing. Needless to say, it didn't work. System began to boot up then crashed. Im guessing I should have put some sort of metal plate in the spot of the peltier. But I figured if I underclocked the system a little it wouldn't need the other side of the heatsink anyhow.

I'm thinking about buying a cheap cooler for it and seeing it that does the trick. Any suggestions for a cheap aftermarket cooler on the X1950xt gecube?

Regarding the P4 3.8ghz see http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20041115-4399.html

I finally settled the Q6600 at a nice 3.0ghz. 4gig DDR2 800 memory at 845mhz and of course the Visiontek HD3870 @ 810mhz GPU and 1170mhz DDR4 memory


http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm06=5245166
11984 3DMarks

NOTE* Above Marks state Processor was at 3.6 ghz.. this is untrue. It was clocked @ 3.2ghz. 3dmarks misread the FSB..



Its 1am here, I will log

 

That's typically insufficient RAM, and with 1GB, that's what I'd expect. Upgrading to 2GB should solve that, and RAM is dirt cheap these days.
I semi-agree with you friend Mo about Vista. It might not be quite as bad as "junk" but it's pretty poor in terms of resource requirements and how slow it runs on a top end PC for how little it accomplishes.
As for the P4 at 3.8, it could be overclocked, but they did make a 3.8Ghz P4 at stock.
The guy who says you gain from having a PhysX card is a total retard, no offense. Firstly, PhysX cards do nothing except in a very small handful of games, and even when they do work, they introduce extra physics effects - that's more fancy effects for your graphics card to have to render, so they actually DECREASE your graphics performance.
For a time I was having my reservations about sticking with ATI hardware on the image quality front because when I upgraded to the 3870 using Catalyst, all the 2D textures in my games were messed up. Turns out I'd just left the mipmap quality set to "high performance" and not "high quality" - that was an easy fix!

Kardson: Funny you should say that about 3dmark misreading the FSB, I had the same problem when I dropped my multiplier, 3dmark didn't notice...
What interests me is how close your score is to mine, about 650 marks or so. Typically people with Quad cores tend to get much higher scores?

 

OOhhh none of those!

Pakistani.

 

Sam,

I have some more work to do on it.

Before I put in the additional 2 gig of memory I was able to hit 3.8ghz with my q6600... I should have benmarked it then.

Right now the system will only boot at 3.0ghz, no higher.
Memory seems to be capped at about 850hmz right now.

Strange part is when I lower the multiplier on the memory and the processor to get 3.6ghz and 800mhz memory the system still doesn't boot... Leads me to believe its an issue with the motherboard. More tests to come once I get some time

 

Lesson? Don't go too cheap on the mobo kids!

 

Which are you using again?

 

Holy crap! How? I have a P5K-E Wifi/ap motherboard. Can you tell me the settings so I can do this with what type of cooling you need? I need help overclocking my quad.

 

Travis (kardson) Virtually 12000 3dmarks - wow!! Man, all of you guys are screaming! (It seems like only yesterday everybody was in the 4000s - except for me of course - and Sam led the pack at almost 7000.) And Abuzar is getting 11000 with the same card I'm going to get, except of course Pci-e to my agp, and hot dual core to my p4 3.2. Thanks for the link to the p4 3.8, I never knew they took it that far. But when I read the story, I remembered, they originally did have the idea of going to 4ghz, before heat just became too much of an issue.

That is one hilarious story about your climb to 3dmark glory. You had the parts hidden in the tire well of your car!!!! I'm gonna have to say, you are one sneaky dude. And smart too, to keep the peace in the family. But how'd you slide the dollars past the budget scrutiny of the wifey, or does she make the mistake of letting you run the checkbook? LOL!

Abuzar, ooohh, Pakistani. The mystery is solved. Ok, is urdu the official language of Pakistan, or are there other languages as well?

Sam, thanks for the post about the 1gig - so you agree that's likely my BF2 problem right there, just like the other dude said. When you say memory is dirt cheap, what 1gig sticks should I get - I'm at 184 pin, ddr400, mobo msi-7103. I have another question. When I saw Mo he was talking about the reliability of his PCs. When I walked into his shop, a dude with a goatee was walking out. Mo later said "Did you see the guy with the goatee that was leaving when you came?" I said yes. He said "That guy is a reseller - he has bought 1500 PCs from me over the last 3 years." I said, "1500!!!" I didn't know he had any customers who bought that kind of quantity from him. Anyway he started talking about the reliability of his components - he said, "For example, I use only Kingston memory because it is so reliable." So I took the panel off my computer to see if I had Kingston, and I don't - I have AM1. In the Bios my timings are 2.5,6,3,3,auto. I was looking at Kingston, and typically you can get 2-2-2-2-1. So my memory is quite a bit slower than Kingston memory from what I can tell.

So, what sticks would you recommend?

-Rich

 

1500, quite impressive, but then had I built one PC every day since I first knew how to, I would be around the 900 mark! Kingston memory isn't the best out there for reliability and performance, but you could certainly do worse, and it's quite cheap, which is obviously why it would appeal to a system builder.
I used these in my X2 4200+ build and they were pretty good:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820145579