Quality of a graphics card

[Edward Yee]

How's the GeForce FX 5900 XT for a gaming card? Particularly, for ArmA 2 and WoW windowed.

[Seggybop]

It's way below the minimum requirement for ArmA 2, but it will probably run WoW on the lowest settings.
Compared to its competition, it was kind of inferior even when it was new.

[Uraniun235]

"kind of inferior" is pretty generous, the FX series was a steaming pile of shit from day one.

[ZGundam]

To be more diplomatic, I would go with a 7900GT or higher for what you want.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

I ran WoW fairly decently on an FX5700.

But yeah... don't bother. Total waste of time and money to bother with a 5 generation-old card. Unless you're in the same boat as me and suddenly find your 6600GT up and died on you and you are now in need of an old AGP card that's better than your Ti4200.

[Mr Bean]

100$ buys you a card a hell of alot better than that. Heck you can find Nvidia 8800's and ATI 3650's in PCI and AGP flavors for around 100$ if you look hard enough.

Let me be blunt the 5900XT series card is quantitatively worse than anything on the market today except perhaps Intel's offering. I'm pretty sure Nvidia's 9100 Laptop chip which retails in bulk for around 11$ could trounce it in any benchmarks.

*Edit found a better comparison a GeForce 9400 GT which retails for 50$ or in bulk for 31.99$ per card.
An Nvidia 5900 XT runs at 400 Mhz core and 700 Mhz on the memory speed. It has 3 Vertex Shader pipelines and 4 Pixel Shader pipelines and comes standard with 128 megs of video memory.
An Nvidia 9400 runs at 550 Mhz core 1400 Mhz memory speed. It has sixteen pipelines which can do either Vertex or Pixel work. Oh and comes standard with 512 megs of video memory.

New Egg will sell you one for 40$

[Uraniun235]

That's a PCI-Express card, Bean, I doubt a computer still running an FX-series is going to have a PCI-E slot.

[Mr Bean]

That's a PCI-Express card, Bean, I doubt a computer still running an FX-series is going to have a PCI-E slot.

Linked to the wrong card

Here's the PCI card
9400
Needless to say the price jumps nearly 30$ for an old PCI interface

[Zixinus]

On the subject of graphics cards: assuming that I figured out that I have a slot, how do I know that my computer can otherwise support a graphics slot?

Because I'm certain that I have PCI-e and an AGP slot, but that's it.

[Haruko]

Because I'm certain that I have PCI-e and an AGP slot, but that's it.

That strikes me as bizarre; I never heard of a computer that has those two graphics slots on one motherboard. Are you certain the PCI is an Express?

[Uraniun235]

On the subject of graphics cards: assuming that I figured out that I have a slot, how do I know that my computer can otherwise support a graphics slot?

Because I'm certain that I have PCI-e and an AGP slot, but that's it.

There are currently three major slot types that include the letters "PCI":

PCI: Peripheral Component Interconnect, an industry standard which has been around since 1993 and for many years dominated as the 'standard' expansion card interface.

PCI-X: a high-performance variant of PCI, introduced in 1998 and primarily intended for servers and expensive workstations. Note the longer slot.

PCI-Express: A relatively new expansion card interface introduced in 2004, sometimes referred to as PCI-E or PCI-Ex, which comes in differing sizes that offer differing amounts of bandwidth to devices. This interface is intended to ultimately replace PCI, PCI-X, and AGP; motherboards currently tend to include a mix of PCI-E and PCI slots to provide compatibility with legacy PCI devices.


Contrast with AGP: Advanced Graphics Port, a specialized slot intended only for graphics cards and now considered obsolete.

[tezunegari]

That strikes me as bizarre; I never heard of a computer that has those two graphics slots on one motherboard. Are you certain the PCI is an Express?

I dare to remember that some Mainboards during the introduction of PCI-Express had both AGP and PCI-Express slots.

The AsRock 939Dual-SATA2 comes to mind.

But they were a small niche product for people who wanted to upgrade their computer with modern AGP-cards but feared the additional cost that would come once they decided to buy a PCI-Express card.

[Zixinus]

Yes, I have one of those.

So, how do I know what a graphics card's requirements are beyond the slot and whether can I supply those needs?

CPU-z tells me that my mainbaord's model is 4CoreDual-Sata2 with a VIA PT880 Pro chipset and a Southbridge of a VIA VT8237S.