f13.net

I ordered the X1600 PRO (139) I mentioned in the Oblivion thread, should have it by Monday or Tuesday.  I'll let you all know how it works with Oblivion compared to the 9800SE I have been using.  I limited myself to just looking at the AGP solutions, I'll talk a little about the AGP vs PCIE stuff at the end.

Other AGP cards I looked at were the 6600GT ($139) the X800GTO ($170) and the 6800GS ($215) (the 7800 GS is right out, 299 bucks for a video card I only plan on using for another 6 - 8 months is retarded).

The 6600 GT just doesn't compare on paper vs the X1600 pro and from what benchmarks I could find just confirmed that.  The X1600 has SM 3.0, more pipelines and more video ram, seems like a no brainier.  The 6600 GS doesn't come in an AGP flavor which seems pretty dumb to me as it is a nice clear step between the 6600 GT and the 6800 GS and if it has been available in AGP for < 170ish I would have gone for it.

The X800GTO looked good too but it was running about $170 and doesn't have SM 3.0 support - but it has almost three times the memory bandwidth.  I know a little something about how memory fetches work and what kind of bottleneck they represent which seems right in line with the way oblivion works so I might end up swapping the X1600 for this and giving up the SM 3.0.  For 30 bucks I'm not too worried about the price.

The 6800 GS seems to blow everything else (that doesn't cost $300, or more) away in the benchmarks even though it also doesn't have SM 3.0 support, still at $215 it was more than I could justify to myself for an AGP card unless I just can't get the performance I want out of the X1600 PRO or X800 GTO.

What is really bothering me though is the price difference between AGP and PCIe solutions.  Sticking the newer chipsets onto an AGP interface seems to be reason enough to up the price 33% or more.  You can get a PCIe card one or two generations above an AGP card at the same price.  Since I do know a bit about hardware design I smell bullshit.  Lots of bullshit.  The change in interface is just not enough to justify a 50 dollar price jump on what is otherwise a $100 piece of equipment.  AGP bus systems are well known and the controllers for them have got to be dirt cheap, as in pennies a part, this late in the cycle of the design.  There is no way that you can sell me on the pin out from the GPU requiring that expensive/complex a part to adapt back to AGP on the newer designs.  Considering the installed base of AGP systems out there I think the first one of these producers that wise up and start offering their AGP parts in quantity at the same (or nearly the same) price as the PCIe part should make a mint.

Frankly, from what I have read on the subject AGP still has lots of life left even the newest GPU systems are not even close to maxing out the throughput available on an AGP bus right now.  The whole thing smacks of massive price gouging.

Well, yeah.

There is NOTHING wrong with AGP, nada, zip, zilch. There is exactly fuckall which even comes close to pushing it so hard that you need the extra bandwidth, and there probably won't be for another generation. What you are paying in the extra AGP price is the "it's time to upgrade, you silicon monkeys" fee. The hardware business feels it is their moral imperative to up the ante at regular business cycles regardless of whether software has caught up. It's just one of the reasons I really fucking hate the PC game industry because it's always attempting to one up the last iteration even when such oneupsmanship isn't necessary, and continually disparaging perfectly good games because they don't have the latest shiney.

If you are comparing apples to apples at the low to mid range the difference is more like $20 - $25 now though it used to be more. There is a bridge chip that's involved which means higher parts cost and higher board costs (more traces) so some added cost is reasonable though adding $50 to a $100 board is clearly not from a consumer's perspective. Here's a picture of the bridge chip on a 6600 GT:

http://techreport.com/reviews/2004q4/geforce-6600gtagp/index.x?pg=1

As you can see that's a pretty big chip package.

Edit: I forgot to mention that AGP versions often have a power connector which means more added cost where the PCi-e might not since the AGP bus slot can't provide as much power as the PCI-e one can.

I never understood the power issue with the AGP slot. Why can't they just....shunt more power to it? Or, design the board to put more power to that slot?

Because of the engines.  They just cannae take it capn.

Pfft, newb.

Learn2Mod.

I'll just run down to the warp core and crank it up a few notches! See you in a few!


*bzzt*

It's a standards thing. If Intel doesn't make it a standard then the motherboard manufacturers have to come up with their own way and video card manufacturers will still have to include the power connector since they can't assume every motherboard will provide the extra power so what's the point? And Intel didn't want to push for an upgraded AGP standard since they were busy promoting PCI Express.

I'm in the same boat and really debating what card to upgrade to. The ATI card mentioned above... I've been an Nvidia guy for years now. The old ATI style of bad drivers and worse site navigation turned me off but I'm hard pressed to take the 6600GT over the X1600 PRO.

How big a difference will I see between those cards on Oblivion? Should I still be disdainful of ATI in comparison to Nvidia? Are there as many nifty tweaking tools for ATI cards?

These seem sort of like noob questions but I'm finding I'm a bit noobier (machine is two years old) than I thought. It used to be fairly cut and dry: 256>128>64, etc. It seems like other stuff is as important in more recent cards.

I've had the Nvidia 6800 Ultra and now have the x850 Pro and the X850 outperforms the 6800 ultra in all games I've played, from EQ2, to Planetside, to BF2, and so on. I have always been an Nvidia person, but this card's convinced me ATI's worth checking out in the future.

Yeah, I'm starting to lean toward the X1600. Seems like way, way more bang for the buck.

I had some Voodoo cards as my first cards, then went to Nvidia.


I hated that damn card. I had to RMA one because the heatsinks were so heavy on it that it slipped out of the AGP slot, while the system was on.

I've been very happy with my ATI cards since.

Well, after reading the New Release Oblivion thread, I am picking up today another 268MB of ram to take my system to 1gig which is the system max.  I am also picking up a base DVD ROM drive.  I am also picking up a BFG NVidia Ge Force 6800 GS.  After performing the same review as Murgos, I am going to go ahead and max this system out now.  It should last me for another year or so at which point it becomes my 5 year old's personal computer/door stop. 

So, after spending $355 in upgrades, I will pick up Oblivion today for $50.00.  After a few hours hiding the purchases from the wife, I hope to install them tonight after everyone is asleep so that I can then install Oblivion so that I can play it for a couple of hours after T ball practice and during the family's Saturday afternoon nap.  So $400 later, I will get to spend the next 3 weeks not sleeping so that I can play the game after the children and wife are asleep but not too much so that I won't be too sleepy to put people in jail all week long.

Damn, I need a new hobby.

Yeah, I'm just not ready at this point to do a whole new motherboard swap and upgrade which is why I went for the lower end of the upgrade cycle.  I know full well that I will be spending another 4 - 5 hundred bucks in 6 to 8 months so the 60 bucks I saved off not getting the 6800 GS is going to go to a nice porterhouse w/trimmings and copious amounts of alcohol :)

Watch, I'll end up sending the X1600 back and going with the 6800 GS in 3 weeks anyways.

Stop, no! You must pick, Murgos, so I can pick.

I'm having a hard time picking. You tech nerds pick for me: 6600GT or X1600?

I couldn't find a 6600GT with 256MB for a decent price.  There don't seem to be many 6600GT's with 256MB.  I can't justify "upgrading" from a FX 5200 with 256MB to a 6600GT with 128MB.  That just seems asinine.  I know the benchmarks show a difference but common sense says it is bullshit.

So, for about the same price as the 6600GT with 256MB AGP, I can get the 6800GS with 256MB and AGP.  6800BS is supposed to be the top of the line for the middle price line for the AGP upgrade line.  :-o  Damn, this video card nonsense has gotten ridiculous.

Speaking from professional experience: ATI drivers suck ass.  ASS.  Every goddamn time I've spoken to a customer or a coworker that has a problem with display driver stability, it's been an ATI card.  Every.  Goddamn.  Time.  Upgrading the drivers rarely works since their latest drivers are invariably just as shitty as their outdated ones, and the best solution ATI support has ever offered me is "disable hardware acceleration". 

I never see problems of that nature with nVIDIA cards.  That more than anything is what keeps me buying nVIDIA.

Went and picked up the X1600 (AGP) over lunch today and wow, what a differnce.  I have a 2.8Pent IV and 1.5GB of Ram.  Had a FX5200 with 128MB and it would run Oblivion like glass melting.  Now I have everything to the max and it screams.  Booted WOW to give it a gander and maxed everything there (obviously not much changed, but I can now see 8x as far as before and that will help  in the PvP).

Picked it up from Best Buy.

$249 WITH rebate!  Holy crap!  Thats $110 bucks more than newegg.  I'm all for convienience but you could have done overnight shipping and come out 80 bones ahead without even worrying about a rebate.

Yes, Newegg has it all over trying to pick up a video card at the local Best Buy, unless you absolutely have to have it right this very minute.

Got this X1600 Pro (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814102678) from Bestbuy, which I can still use the mail in rebate.  I got it for $249.00 before the rebate, so overall I am netting the card for $199.00 and didn't have to worry about mail to return feature.

I could have run over to Fry's and checked over what they might have had, but honestly I am cool with the purchase.

My video card is not in stock.  It might be in on Tuesday but more likely Thursday.  So, I guess I will spend the weekend staring at the Oblivion box.   :-(

I find it odd that my old 9800 pro seems to run Oblivion better than some of these later cards people are upgrading. Are they just cheap cards or something? I tend to wait until the end of a product cycle and buy the last super-card when it dives in price and everyone else is jumping on new architectures. My old GF2 Ultra 64MB was the same way, it was dusting a lot of later gen cards, even two gens later!

If you snagged the last gen high end 9800 XT with 256 MB ram and a 256 bit bus and the high clock speeds and 8 pixel pipes then yes, you should be much better off then people with the low end but newer cards.  The 9800 XT card still goes for 170 bones by the way.  In comparison the 6600 GT also has 8 pixel pipes but only 128 bit bus, and 128 MB of ram and roughly equivalent clock speeds.  The 6600 GT is only 120 now in PCIe and with a rebate though so yes, the 9800 XT is still a good card.  What you don't have is the new whiz bang graphical doodads that your card just doesn't even know about.

Omega Drivers. For the win.

6600 GT. It's a little more expensive than the X1600 Pro and it has less memory but the X1600 Pro needs the extra memory since it has a gimpy memory bus (half the bandwidth of the X1600 XT) but the 6600 GT is still the faster card and NVIDIA drivers are still more stable than the ATI ones even though ATI has made great strides since the pre-Radeon days.

Ended up going witht he 6600GT and holy fuck is it smooth. While the settings are in the upper end of medium it still looks phenomenal with no hiccups at all. 1260x780, distant land/full view distance, good water effects... this is with 768 RAM and a 1.8 CPU. Never seen a game where the vid card is almost the sole bottleneck.

Thought I would update this with my X1600 impressions though I already mentioned them in the Oblivion thread.

The installation was smooth, too smooth, so I went and screwed it up by downloading the latest drivers and catalyst version after whose installation everything went wonky after the mandatory reboot.  Fortunately, that only lasted the length of time it took to do another reboot and I haven't had a problem with the drivers since (admitedly only a few hours).  Possibly some strange registry thing that updated and then needed to be updated again.  Regardless, it works fine now.

The X1600 PRO is quieter than the 9800 SE was, not that the 9800 SE was loud but there is a noticible decrease in machine noise.

Oblivion autdetected that I had changed my graphics adapter and asked me if I wanted to go to high quality settings which I accepted.  I am not a frame rate addict, as long as I am above 16 FPS or so I am generally pretty happy.  Frankly, I doubt the veracity of most peoples complaints ovre framerates anyway, I think most framerate whores whine about poor framerates only because they have been told they need 60+ FPS.  That said, I have no idea what framerate I am getting now but to me it is very smooth at 1024x768 with everything on except self-shadows and canopy shadows, textures set to large and HDR on, most sliders pushed toward the 'good' end and water effects on max settings.  I'll look up what the console command in oblivion is to turn frame rates on and report back tonight or tomorrow with various settings in a couple of places like in Oblivion and in a town and out in the wilderness.

HDR looks really good, I wasn't a big fan of bloom effects when the concept was first introduced (Thief 3 I'm looking at you) but Oblivion has done it in such a way that it does enhance the look of the game and HDR just really makes all the colors pop so I am glad I went for a card that could handle it.  Plus HDR/SM 3.0 supposedly provides better quality for less work which should help extend the life of the card a bit.

The X1600 Pro I ordered was the OEM version from newegg so no box and the only software it came with was the driver disk (which I never used).  The card did come with an S-Video cable and an S-Video to RGB adapter which is nice because I had been wanting one to hook my computer up to my big screen.

If anyone has any questions about the X1600 I'll be happy to try and give you an answer.  Oh, delivery took three full work days, not bad, not great either.

I have had the 6800GT since right after it was released, and I have been nothing except happy with its proformance. I have been able to run pretty much every game on high and have it look beautiful. I have been a nvidia fan for a long time.

I'll second that one. I'm thinking that now might be a good time to ebay it for someone looking to go SLI though...

Unfortunately these don't exist for anything higher than Forceware 66.93, otherwise I'd have them.  Latest OEMs work well enough I guess.

Same here. I don't know how much it sells for now or how the 6600 GT and GS compare, but I will third the 6800 GT vote.

Me too, until Oblivion.  Don't get me wrong, the game runs fine and looks beautiful, but there's a deep and whorish part of me that wants it autodetected on 'Supreme' rather than 'High'.

:)

Ok - I turned on shadows and it ground to a slide show... Dammit. Now I have to look at a new card and sli....

I have an unhealthy craving for shadows. Full shadows with multiple specular sources in EQ2 is amazing. I can't wait until hardware comes out that can actually render it at a playable framerate. That's when I'll be upgrading.

Installed my new GeForce 7800 GS last night. Oblivion autodetected it to 'Very High', but still set the resolution at 1024x768. I cranked it up to 1600x1200 and had no problems other than a bit of slowing when there was a combat with several people on the screen. This was also a few hours into my play session, so the suspected memory leak(s) could have been the culprit.

Golly things are pretty now.

I have that whorish part too, but after looking at the prices of a 7800 with 512MB ... I'll wait.  The 6800 GT 256 is good enough for now.

Yeah, that's exactly what I have.  As you say, it'll do.

Until Elder Scrolls 14.

I don't think it's necessarily that ATI drivers suck ass so much as companies don't bother to test on ATI at all. ATI seems very quick in fixing problems as they are found with popular games but I really don't think their drivers are particularly crappy. I think it's just like the days when everyone tested their games on 3dfx and Nvidia cards were left in the cold.

I have an 9800 pro and it's been fine other than the problem with WoW in some zones where the gpu recover was triggering. The latest drivers fixed that. The latest problem has been with Oblivion, which uses some wierd refraction shader which makes ATI antialiasing take a huge crap framerate wise. Turning off anti-aliasing or disabling the shader in the ini file fixed the problem.

That said, I probably won't buy another ATI. It used to be that the quality of the anti-aliasing was worth the extra hassle but now Nvidia seems to have caught up and I hate hassles so I'm gonna be a big suck and go with the standard everyone is testing with. Just like using a Creative sound card generally used to assure you no sound problems because everyone tested with Creative, the Nvidia has become the industry standard, leaving other card owners in the dirt waiting for driver updates to fix manufacturer's problems.

I've been considering this exact conundrum as well.  I'm probably going to go with the 7800GS (retarded or not :D).  Basically because I've stretched out my 9800Pro for 3 years and I'd plan to do the same with a new card.

I also compared this option with a motherboard upgrade with a PCIe slot.  I could be looking at the wrong metric but PCI-e cards with similar specs to 7800GS seemed to be similarly priced to slightly more.

I didn't even look at the AGP version of the 7800.  Whether or not PCIe makes technical sense, I might as well go that route and stave off the next mobo upgrade as long as possible.  The price difference is negligible in my mind.

NVIDIA doesn't make a PCIe equivalent of the 7800GS however the 7900GT is substantially faster than the 7800GS and only around $30 more.

I jumped to PCIe this week. Picked up an Asus SLI board on sale and the 7600gt vid card. When the price drops I hope to pick up a second one. Unfortunately Oblivion didn't recognise the 7600 so I had to hand tune the settings myself but I am very happy with the results. Not to sure how I like HDR though. I think I prefer FSAA to it though and they seem to be mutually exclusive atm.

Follow up.  Using the 'Chuck patch' for my x1600 and I couldn't be happier.  HDR, 2xAA @ 1280x1024, most bells and whistles and getting 20+ FPS in even grassy areas.  HDR + AA = WOW.  Everything is noticibly clearer and just better looking.

I R confused. What is HDR and why should I care if a video card has it?

HDR = High dynamic Range Lighting

Better, more colorful lighting - it's a big improvement.  Also, it is supposed to be less work for the GPU than other methods of lighting if it has the proper built-in stuff for it (i.e. Shader Model 3.0 usually just called SM 3.0).  So, it's more betterer.

I just noticed it makes things shinier.

You mean video games need MORE methods to make shit shinier than Telly Savalas's head?

You can never have too much shiny. Except for lens flare. Lens flare needs to die a horrible painful death.

So, what is the upshot of this conversation for someone who doesn't really want to understand overclocking, chipsets and all that.

I ordered a ASUS Nvidia GEforce 6800 GT from Newegg last Saturday.  It arrived last evening, and two heat sinks fell off, because they weren't even attached to the card.  God it's got a big fan on it.  Anyway, after much cursing and wailing and gnashing of teeth (because I've been able to do nothing but merely fondle my Oblivion box since last weekend when I got it), the thing is packed up and ready to go back to Newegg.

I can order another one and wait another week or so to get it from Newegg, or I can ask my husband to stop by someplace and pick me up a video card.  The problem is, I have no idea what to get or what price to pay.  Seems Newegg has great prices.  But I really don't want to wait another week.  I want to play now.

So I called Fry's, and could not understand a word the guy said.  Between the acronyms for things I don't know what they are, the accent, the speed at which he was speaking, and the fact that he works at Fry's (the worst customer service I've ever seen), I just wanted to get off the phone as quickly as possible because it was just torturous.

Stores available are Fry's, Circuit City, Best Buy.....  Can someone please just tell me whether I can buy a video card for under $300 that will perform decently at one of these places and if so which card, and which place?

I hate hardware.  I don't even want to understand it.  I just want to get something and have it work.

Like, how is this one?

http://www.circuitcity.com/ssm/eVGA-e-GeForce-7800-GS-Video-Card-256-A8-N506-/sem/rpsm/oid/144489/catOid/-13043/rpem/ccd/productDetail.do

Sure, that card would be great.  It's $100 dollars more than you said you wanted to pay but, surprisingly, the price is equivalent to newegg.

If you're willing to pay that much then I say go for it.

It's still under $300! 

Thanks much.

I just talked to a guy at Circuit City, who scared me into taking off the cover and looking at my computer.  It has a AGP slot.  He scared me into thinking that maybe my power supply isn't up to powering something like that, so I called my husband (who does not share my aversion to hardware, thank goodness) who assured me that the power supply is brawny enough to handle anything.

Now just to find one somewhere.

How does that one compare with this one?

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=7634713&type=product&productCategoryId=cat01151&id=1130987912328

Which one would you buy, if somebody else was paying for it, and why?

I misread and thought you had said you wanted to stay under 200.

Yeah, for 300 bucks from a retail store thats a pretty good deal.

edit:  The 7800 GS is an all around better card than the x1600 pro (which is less than 140 online, that price is a HUEG rip).

I ended up with the 7800GS for the required Oblivion upgrade.  The 7800GS is simply amazing.  Oblivion read it as Ultra High Quality.

The game runs well on it.  Since this computer is at the end of the upgrade cycle, I splurged on the high level card.  It was a good decision.

I'm playing obvlivion nicely on an AGP x850 pro. Oblivion is uber, but its not THAT uber. EQ2 still demands more of a vid card than that game does.

Get the 7800 GS -- it's much faster than the X1600 Pro. The X1600 Pro is roughly comparable to the 6600 GT, if you are familiar with that model.

Edit: My bad. I'll never figure out ATI's numbering scheme. The x1600 pro isn't as good as the x850 pro which is better than the 6800 ultra.

LOL, and I bet you think the GF4 MX 440 is faster than, say, the GF3 Ti 200 because, you know it goes to 4! The X1600 series is an updated 9600, if you know that line. It is nowhere near comparable to the 9800/X800/X850/X1800 lineup.

Your benchmarks don't show the X1600. Check out these instead:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/radeon-x1600.html

The X1600 XT beats the 6600 GT in most of the benchmarks, loses in some, and is a wash in the rest. Oh and BTW, the X1600 Pro has *half* the memory bandwidth of the X1600 XT tested above (that's why most Pro models have 512 MB, it needs that because the memory bandwidth is so gimpy). Benchmarks for the X1600 Pro are very rare since its so gimpy and I haven't seen a straight up comparison between the X1600 Pro and 6600 GT hence my claim that the X1600 Pro is "roughly" comparable to the 6600GT.

Yep, you're right. I was operating under the invalid assumption that a company putting out a whole next generations of cards would be actually better cards. My bad.

I found a direct comparison except it's with a 256 MB X1600 Pro -- I would expect the 512 MB to be somewhat faster:

http://en.thethirdmedia.com/pc/200603/20060321104659.shtm

Edit: fixed typo

Yeah - the X1600 is a 'cut down' version of the higher end cards, much like the GF4MX cards were compared to the GF3 cards that preceded them.  Fucking marketing wonks apply the bigger number to the entry-level card because 'it's teh new, and we'd rather everyone bought teh new!'  It offers good performance for around $120 or so, and if someone asked 'what would be the best choice at $100-150', I'd recommend it wholeheartedly. 

The *most* comparable card to the X1600Pro is probably the GF6800 which is generally available for around the same price or slightly more and generally slightly outperforms it.  Drivers tend to be a bit better with NV cards, but in most games, there's no difference and certainly not enough to worry about it more than price.

If you're looking for *the* most kickass AGP card for under $300, the GF7800GS (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814170097) is your choice.  If you're shopping at lower price points, there's a number of offerings that will fit the bill.  The overall tendency is for NV cards to have better performance at a given price point at no AA/no AF on, but for ATI cards to close the gap and supercede their nVidia counterparts as those features are enabled and the resolution goes up.

As an aside, both Tom's Hardware and Anand have articles relevant to this - I'd check those sites first - I'm particularly fond of Tom's Hardware's VGA charts (http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics.html?modelx=33&model1=318&model2=293&chart=87) when it comes to this stuff.

Just wondering, but how do you all think a Radeon 9800Pro 256 would fare with Oblivion?

Just read the PC Gamer review today. Sounds interesting to try. Also, more focused than Morrowind.

I can't play big games that lack focus - I end up just falling out of the habit of playing it. See: Freelancer.

(And it's a shame about Freelancer, because it had great controls and graphics, but I got lost playing alone in the sandbox)

Phred was using one before he upgraded to a 7600 GT (scroll up to see his posts).
 

Soooo... I bought a new card yesterday. I went to get a Sapphire X800 GTO 2, but my buddy at the store told me they had this deal atm about the Sapphire X850XT (which normally costs $400, and they were selling a very limited ammount for $200) so I couldn't turn that down. Is the sapphire X850XT a good card? I truly don't know shit about hardware and I have enough useless information in my head so I'd really like to keep it that way. A simple Yes or No or better than this and that, worse than the other and the third would do.

Short answer:  Yes - it'll handle modern games pretty well, but if that store normally sells the X850XT for $400, don't shop there any more (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814102483).

The X850 XT was ATI's top-of-the-line GPU at the beginning of last year. It's roughly comparable to the GeForce 6800 GT/Ultra if you are familiar with those GPUs. It's definitely better performance than the X800 GTO. One disadvantage with that line of cards is that it doesn't support DirectX Shader Model 3.0 so you might not see certain bits of eye-candy on the latest games.

I have the X850 pro, which if I understand it correctly, is the same as the XT but with a few less pixel pipelines. Oblivion works rather nicely with it. Its by no means super duper, but I'm content. The price on newegg is right, so I would go for it.

So what would be a nice card to upgrade to from a Radeon 9800PRO 256?

I'd really like to stay with the 256mb onboard Vram.

How much did want to spend? If you don't plan on switching to PCIe the two fastest AGP cards would be the 7800GS that's been mentioned above multiple times and the ATI X850XT PE.

What is the PE for?

Has AGP technology ever hit its bus setting (2x, 4x, 6x, 8x) as a bottleneck? Reason I ask, is that AGP reviews I've read have always noted "but this makes little difference in practice". I have a mobo that only goes up to 6x so it runs my 9600XT at 4x (card is capable of 8x). I probably have the processor and RAM grunt to benefit from say a 6800GS (which are a good buy now that the 7800GS is out), but I'd have to run it at AGP 4x so I wonder whether that would hurt it a lot, or if the reviews that keep not caring about AGP 8x are right?

No intention of building a new system for a year or so, until [NDA] comes out, but I could afford a video card upgrade for the sake of current games if I would benefit from it. Processor is 2.4GHz P4 and RAM is 1Gb (not messing with either of those in current system). The 9600XT runs WoW at an easy 40fps and is adequate for BF2, which I also play. Don't own Oblivion yet, but might someday. Think I should bother with 6800GS?

I know there's no diff between agp and pci e in terms of performance, but I don't know about agp 4x vs 8x. I would recommend buying a new motherboard, but if you have the computer I think you have, you have a wierd cpu socket type and you won't be able to find a motherboard that can both do your cpu and upgrade you to 8x agp or pci e. You probably also have rambus ram, so basically, uhm, yer right. No partial upgrades possible for you.

Platinum Edition.

Try playing it on your 9800 and it will probably be fine unless you absolutely MUST have the latest shiny. I'm playing on a 9600 at 800x600 with most of the good stuff turned off but it still looks pretty good to me. I'm sure it will be even better with a 9800.

Yes you can certainly measure a difference between AGP x4 and x8 in certain benchmarks especially at high resolutions where just shuffling the bits between the video card's frame buffer and your system's RAM can take quite a bit of bandwidth, so if you like running at 1600 x 1200 or higher you are probably gimping yourself somewhat by not supporting AGP x8. On the other hand given your CPU I would say that will be the bottleneck in the vast majority of situations so I wouldn't worry about not being able to run at x8. If you can afford it I would say switching to the 6800 GS is worth it just for the Shader Model 3.0 support -- i.e. you'll get to see a lot more of the shiney compared to the 9600 XT.

Thanks for the advice. I mostly run in 1280x1024 on a 19" Sony flatscreen CRT. The monitor supports 1600x1200 but I don't like running that on a 19". I think I'll go for the 6800GS and see what it's like at 4x AGP.

Engels, my system is not that wierd, but it is old: Skt478 motherboard (http://www.albatron.com.tw/english/it/mb/specification.asp?pro_id=7) and DDR333 SDRAM in 2x 512Mb sticks. It has a shiny new C drive (300Gb ATA133 16Mb cache) but only because another drive died. It would support 2Gb RAM, but that would mean replacing the existing RAM with two 1Gb sticks, which just isn't worth the money for the remaining lifespan. The only worthwhile motherboard upgrade would be a move to today's standards, meaning I'd need to replace the processor, RAM, video card, etc. That's called building a new machine :)

P.S. In case you follow the link to the mobo, the DDR400, 667MHz bus and SATA support are all buggy and best avoided. The AGP is 6x capable but I guess they listed it as 4x because that's the only practical setting. So in practice it's a 533MHz bus, DDR333, ATA133, 4x AGP board :)

Well, I put in the parameters the motherboard describes in terms of socket type and memory requirements, and I did come up with some viable motherboard options:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?Submit=ENE&N=2010200280+1070509907+1072407534&Subcategory=280&description=&srchInDesc=&minPrice=&maxPrice=

Of course, changing motherboard is a major operation and there's a good chance that your OS would not boot to such a radical configuration change. Then again, I've had an old OS on a socket A AMD 3200 boot to a socket 939 AMD 64 chip with no glitches. You just never know.

First of all, I'm one of those kids that has to run at higher resolutions. I don't mind turning off the crazy stuff too much, but anything below 1280x1024 kind of grates on me.

In a week or two I might pick Oblivion up and give it a shot, then buy an X850 if needed (it has 256 VRAm, correct?).

Oblivion is playing nicely on my 9800 pro @ 1280x720.

I've been doing some research and have almost talked myself out of getting the 7800gs.  There seems to be a power issue where by you need 18-20A on the 12V rail on your PSU.  If you don't have the power you get blackscreen and non-booting.  My psu does 18A.  Mind you it's not totally clear since all I'm going with is the evga forums and newegg feedback where posters are with fake (newegg) or idiots (using a below spec power supply).

What's your experience with power and stability WayAbvPar?

I have a 7800GS and my screaming fast, state of the art, Dell Dimension 4450 250 watt power supply only puts out: 14 amps at +12vdc, 22 amps at +5vdc, 18 amps at +3.3vdc.

I have had zero power supply problems in the 2 weeks that I have had the card installed. 

I think someone is trying to find something to complain about. 

ZOMG YOU LIE!!111

Everyone knows modern computers will not function without at least a 400W power supply.


Even though peak usage of everything in the system is probably below 200W

I went ahead and ordered the x1600 yesterday (120USD, bitches).  I went with the 512 meg video option; just seemed like the sane thing to do.  Also found a nice mobo for a great price; did not realize the CPU would end up costing me a bundle though.  All told I spent around 400USD and got:

ATI x1600 512M: http://www.firingsquad.com/hw/6790/Sapphire_Radeon_X1600_PRO_512MB_PCIe/
MOBO:  http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813135196
CPU, 3.0g 800FSB yada yada yada: http://www.ewiz.com/detail.php?name=P4-630

I am hoping it will run dreamy.  Not that I am having graphic issues currently (Well I sorta am, but its due to a seperate issue).  Basically upgrading from a P4 2.8 CPU w/ Radeon 9800SE w/256M. 

Anyone have a similiar setup?  Any issues?

Not a similar setup, but I'd be curious to know how your set goes once you get it all up and running.  I'm currently sitting on a P4 2.53, 1gb ram, and a 6600GT w/ 128mb running on a 4x AGP board and am starting to feel a bit left behind (mainly because I can't add more ram to my rig since the mobo is crap).

Nice tihng about the mobo I ordered is it takes both DDR and DDR2; that means I can hold off on getting new RAM until later.  The main issue I came across with the Prentiss CPU is heat- I went ahead and ordered a fancy ass fan/heatsink thingamabobber.  Evidently some people have overclocked the thing to 4.1htz, but that requires serious cooling tech.  Heh.


edit.  FYI the total I spent for all of the above + nice ass heatsink/fan for the CPU was almost exactly 400USD.  Ebay + Froogle 4TW.  Ill let ya know if it was worth it next week.

That's an odd selection of components. You are basically spending $400 for a mostly lateral move.

The X1600 Pro is a step up from the 9800SE but that's cause the 9800SE is gimped to begin with (half the pixel pipelines of the 9800 Pro) so you are trading one gimpy card for a slightly less gimpy card (X1600 Pro has half the memory bandwidth of the X1600 XT, for example).

That motherboard has a gimped AGP slot which you won't be using meaning it has less slots of other more useful cards (may not be an issue depending on your usage). It doesn't support the Pentium D (dual core Pentium 4) so you don't have access to that upgrade path, not to mention the Pentium 4 is a dead end processor line for Intel (Core Duo is where their focus is now). According to the comments DDR2 on that motherboard doesn't get you any performance improvement, and you are paying for onboard video which you aren't using (though the board is already so cheap that doesn't really matter).

Your CPU choice is basically a lateral move as well (2.8 GHz to 3.0 GHz).

I'd say you are better off going with a socket 939 Athlon 64 3200+ and an nForce4 motherboard for roughly the same price. You get a faster CPU, you get to keep your memory (assuming it can run at PC3200 or faster) and you have the option of going to a dual core A64 X2 in the future if you like (unlike Intel you don't need an entirely different chipset to use AMD dual core CPUs).

AnandTech yesterday published some Oblivion GPU benchmarks including tests on some of the mid-range cards people have been discussing here:

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2746&p=1

I went ahead with my upgrade also - bought an Xpertvision 6800GS with 512Mb RAM. Figured the extra video RAM would compensate for staying with 1Gb system RAM, and the extra cost was small. Installed it yesterday and have tried WoW, Oblivion, Battlefield 2 and (NDA). Playing all at 1280x1024 and 4x AGP. See my posts above for other system specs.

The most noticeable things with the 6800GS are:
1. In WoW and Oblivion, running with everything switched on is now similar in performance to running with things switched off. So I can keep everything turned up and enjoy how it looks. Yet to try this with BF2.
2. Probably ~20fps higher on average in WoW. If I looked down at the ground or up at the sky in an isolated area, previously I could hit 50-60fps. Now I hit 80-100fps (OK highest I saw was 96). It can still slow down to 15-20fps when running from Ironforge AH to Ironforge bank through a crowd, but it cruises at 35-50fps elsewhere (and on raids) with all options maxed, which with my old card would have been 20-35fps with some options turned down.
3. Loaded BF2 with my previous standard settings and played Strike at Karkand map (intense city combat with dust/fog effects in the air). There was not even one bit of lag, it was an utter blast and a joy to play. Previous card would have had some slowdown.
4. It achieved the desired result of making (NDA) somewhat playable on my PC. Again, turning options up/down has little effect because the card is engineered to do those options as standard, unlike my previous card.
5. I start to see my other bottlenecks, mainly processor and system bus I think. If I really push the card in WoW (jump around madly in crowded Ironforge, or fly a griffin just above the ground over a crowded area) I can cause a bit of hitching that seems to be system related, rather than just disk access and texture loading. Certain parts of (NDA) slow to a crawl, but that's probably just the nature of an unoptimised product in development.

Going from an ATI to an NVidia I noticed the colours seemed a bit less vibrant. But there is a setting "digital vibrance" in the options where adding a tiny bit gave me the same colour strength as the other card. However, the 2D performance feels more solid. I wouldn't describe it as crisper, just somehow more natural looking than the ATI. I like the NVidia driver UI better too, and it's a smaller download and faster install.

Card makes me laugh, though: it's a full-length AGP board, stretching right past the RAM slots, with a fan that takes up the space of a PCI slot (it even takes two of the faceplates on the back of the PC), and requires two molex power connectors. Fortunately I already had a 420W PSU.

All up, mission accomplished. It should give me another year's gaming out of this PC.

Ok, so I'm playing it on a lowend card, I guess. It's very playable and looks great, I can't see spending a couple hundred bones to get a slight improvement my girlfriend wouldn't even notice.

Oblivion is much less forgiving than BF2 in my experience; you should be able to run BF2 at the highest settings with no trouble.

You need a TARDIS to run Oblivion with all the bells + whistles.

True. At the time I posted, I had only owned Oblivion for 24 hours and thought the "high" default settings it chose must actually be high. But they ain't :) Other than that, my post stands.

Well system is operational and seems to be running smooth.  I ended up with a dead mobo, so was forced to get another.  Installation was a bitch; finally I flashed the bios and everything came up fine.  Graphics are pretty awesome.  WoW runs smoothly even with all graphics turned up.  Thus far I am satisfied with the x1600 performance.

Wow runs smoothly on a Commodore 64 man. Nothin surprising there.

heh (http://www.hkepc.com/bbs/attachments_dir/ext_jpg/d2h5LWRvZXNuXA==_8lE5AgoA3RkM.jpg)

That's some funny shit. I think I know that guy, heh.

He also does a magic trick- he makes $100 bills disappear by setting them on fire.