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New Video Card Recommendations

Posted: 2005-12-22 12:04am
by Tartarus
Yes, it's that time again. My ATI Radeon 9550 cant even play FEAR on lowest settings, and I need a new video card, preferably one that'll play games a year from now with full graphical settings. My budget is anything from $500 down. Any help would be appreciated, as im a total n00b at choosing hardware.

Posted: 2005-12-22 12:18am
by phongn
$500 CDN? That's a lot of dough. What's your system specs?

Posted: 2005-12-22 12:20am
by Tartarus
Sony VAIO PCV-RS610
1 gb ram
2 x 160 gb hd
Pentium 4 2.8 ghz w/HT
xp home

Posted: 2005-12-22 12:25am
by Nephtys
For less than 500 canadian, you can buy pretty much any card on the market that I'm aware of. I've heard good things about the nVidia 6600/6800. Never tried one though, but my Radeon X600Pro doesn't really cut it for high end stuff.

Posted: 2005-12-22 12:36am
by Tartarus
I've heard many good things about nvidia cards, and i've heard they vastly outperform their ati counterparts, and I was wondering; is this fact, or just hype?

Posted: 2005-12-22 12:39am
by Ace Pace
It depends on how much you have to spend.

At the low end(66GT,X700), nVidia wins. Then you have a very confusing collection of nVidia and ATi cards from the X8xx and the 6800xx range, which is very much differing price to FPS.
High end we get the X1800xx and the 7800xx, where the 7800GT is the best buy.

Posted: 2005-12-22 01:05am
by Darwin
Vote for the 7800GT here. by far a lot of bang for the buck.

Posted: 2005-12-22 01:12am
by Tartarus
I apologise, I forgot to mention that I only have an AGP slot, so I cant use a pci express card.

Posted: 2005-12-22 01:48am
by Darth Quorthon
Tartarus wrote:I apologise, I forgot to mention that I only have an AGP slot, so I cant use a pci express card.
For $500, you should be able to get either an ATI Radeon x800xt or x850xt, or possibly an NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra. These will all give you a significant performance boost over what you currently have. Assuming that that's still your budget and you want to spend it all.

There are some Radeon x1000 series cards coming out in AGP now, but so far it's just the x1300le and the x1600pro. Nothing to get too excited about, I have heard.

Posted: 2005-12-22 01:50am
by Darwin
AGP kind of limits you.

6800 is just too last-gen, so your best AGP card is probably gonna be an x850.

Re: New Video Card Recommendations

Posted: 2005-12-22 01:58am
by Uraniun235
Tartarus wrote:preferably one that'll play games a year from now with full graphical settings.
I don't think you can accomplish this with an AGP motherboard.

Posted: 2005-12-22 05:15am
by Xon
Get 2gb DDR400 ram and a Geforce 6600gt, and turn hyperthreading off.

Best thing you can do.

Posted: 2005-12-22 08:33am
by Ace Pace
ggs has the best suggestion for the AGP.

Posted: 2005-12-22 08:38am
by mb1235
I also agree with ggs, but I'd go for 6800gt and clock it to ultra, but then you might not have the know-how for it and go the easy way and get the 6600.

Posted: 2005-12-22 09:06am
by Xon
Ace Pace wrote:ggs has the best suggestion for the AGP.
I really cant understate how turning hyperthreading off in the BIOS will help.

An intel hyperthreading CPU pretends to be 2 completely different CPU cores, but it is one CPU core working on one thread when the other has stalled. Most threaded apps assume that both virtual CPU "cores" on a HT CPU are complete CPU cores. But they are not.

This will baddly hurt preformance.

Posted: 2005-12-22 09:12am
by Ace Pace
ggs wrote:
Ace Pace wrote:ggs has the best suggestion for the AGP.
I really cant understate how turning hyperthreading off in the BIOS will help.

An intel hyperthreading CPU pretends to be 2 completely different CPU cores, but it is one CPU core working on one thread when the other has stalled. Most threaded apps assume that both virtual CPU "cores" on a HT CPU are complete CPU cores. But they are not.

This will baddly hurt preformance.
Huh? :?

On that note, any reason why you can't(as with the X2s, not sure about the pentium Ds) make sure games use only 1 core?

Posted: 2005-12-22 10:49am
by BabelHuber
1 gb ram
2 x 160 gb hd
Pentium 4 2.8 ghz w/HT
xp home
With this CPU, you are pretty CPU-limited. I'd recommend an ATi X800GTO or a Nvidia GF6800GT (if you still can find the latter - it's not in production anymore).

As a sidenote: I've seen a PC with a XFX GF7800GT OC and an Athlon64 3200+ S939:
Quake 4 reported ~66fps in a timedemo (1024x768 4xAA 8xAF HQ) with the CPU at stock settings (2GHz). At 2.6GHz, the baby achieved ~86fps (RAM only at 212MHz)!

So I wouldn't recommend to pair a GF7800GT/ X1800 with an outdated CPU, except if you plan to upgrade your CPU soon, too.

Posted: 2005-12-22 11:08am
by Arthur_Tuxedo
I think your best bet here is going to be a 6800 non-ultra. The 6800 NU is at least 20-30% faster than the 6600 GT, for about $30-40 more. That card and that system should last you a year, no problem. I've only got a 9800 Pro and I don't plan on upgrading until Christmas '06.

That would only be about $250 of your $500 (assuming you're talking Canadian $, otherwise less), so you could save your money toward a more complete upgrade in about a year. You could spend the full $500 now, but you'd be looking at some majorly diminishing returns in terms of bang for buck. The only more expensive card I would recommend would be a 6800 GT. There's another 25-35% difference from the NU, but there's also a price difference of about $100.

Posted: 2005-12-22 08:48pm
by Xon
Ace Pace wrote:Huh? :?

On that note, any reason why you can't(as with the X2s, not sure about the pentium Ds) make sure games use only 1 core?
Thats something Windows can do on "multi-core/processor" systems. But that doesnt stop everything else from trying to use the hyperthreading virtual processor and shooting your preformance to hell.

There is a very limited class of applications which benfit from hyperthreading, and in general games arent one of them.

Posted: 2005-12-22 09:45pm
by phongn
The Windows XP scheduler is better at trying to prioritize properly when SMT is involved but it doesn't always work and you also also lose some cache effectiveness. And, alas, most programs are not written to properly handle an SMT machine.

Posted: 2005-12-22 11:01pm
by Uraniun235
BabelHuber wrote:
1 gb ram
2 x 160 gb hd
Pentium 4 2.8 ghz w/HT
xp home
With this CPU, you are pretty CPU-limited. I'd recommend an ATi X800GTO or a Nvidia GF6800GT (if you still can find the latter - it's not in production anymore).

As a sidenote: I've seen a PC with a XFX GF7800GT OC and an Athlon64 3200+ S939:
Quake 4 reported ~66fps in a timedemo (1024x768 4xAA 8xAF HQ) with the CPU at stock settings (2GHz). At 2.6GHz, the baby achieved ~86fps (RAM only at 212MHz)!

So I wouldn't recommend to pair a GF7800GT/ X1800 with an outdated CPU, except if you plan to upgrade your CPU soon, too.
There won't be an 7800 card made for AGP - it's all PCI-Express from here on out.

Posted: 2005-12-23 02:00am
by The Kernel
phongn wrote:The Windows XP scheduler is better at trying to prioritize properly when SMT is involved but it doesn't always work and you also also lose some cache effectiveness. And, alas, most programs are not written to properly handle an SMT machine.
The XP scheduler is not the problem, the Pentium 4's design means a limited amount of CPU resources for the virtual core and whenever it tries to hit up a unit that the physical primary is using, you get a stall.

The NetBurst core just wasn't designed for SMT, and even if it was, it would be silly for non-multithreaded applications; Windows benefits much more from a CMT/SMP design.

SMT is useful, but usually the best place for it is big iron which is used to hundreds of independent threads at a time. In the POWER5 designs, SMT can give some pretty dramatic increases in CPU efficiency, but for desktop users it's dual core all the way.

Posted: 2005-12-23 09:35am
by phongn
The Kernel wrote:The XP scheduler is not the problem, the Pentium 4's design means a limited amount of CPU resources for the virtual core and whenever it tries to hit up a unit that the physical primary is using, you get a stall.
I wasn't blaming the scheduler - only noting that it tried to make the best of the situation.
SMT is useful, but usually the best place for it is big iron which is used to hundreds of independent threads at a time. In the POWER5 designs, SMT can give some pretty dramatic increases in CPU efficiency, but for desktop users it's dual core all the way.
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