New Video Card Recommendations

[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.

[phongn]

$500 CDN? That's a lot of dough. What's your system specs?

[Tartarus]

Sony VAIO PCV-RS610
1 gb ram
2 x 160 gb hd
Pentium 4 2.8 ghz w/HT
xp home

[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.

[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?

[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.

[Darwin]

Vote for the 7800GT here. by far a lot of bang for the buck.

[Tartarus]

I apologise, I forgot to mention that I only have an AGP slot, so I cant use a pci express card.

[Darth Quorthon]

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.

[Darwin]

AGP kind of limits you.

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

[Uraniun235]

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.

[Xon]

Get 2gb DDR400 ram and a Geforce 6600gt, and turn hyperthreading off.

Best thing you can do.

[Ace Pace]

ggs has the best suggestion for the AGP.

[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.

[Xon]

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.

[Ace Pace]

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?

[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.

[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.

[Xon]

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.

[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.

[Uraniun235]

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.

[The Kernel]

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.

[phongn]

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.

CONROE CONROE