Author Topic: Vid Card Upgrade Question (Read 1325 times)

Zaphod · « **on:** February 16, 2005, 12:16:10 PM »

What is the next "step up" from an ATI Radeon 9600XT 128mg?

I have currently:

AMD64 socket 754 3400
Asus K8V SE Deluxe MB
1024 MB Ram
80MB Seagate SATA HD

Actually a series of steps from this vid card up to the hottest or close to hottest card would be really cool. I would like to get the vid card to match the system maybe a little closer.

Zaphod

Skuzzy · « **Reply #1 on:** February 16, 2005, 12:30:47 PM »

9800pro
9800XT
X800Pro
X800XT

Would be the pecking order for ATI card's in performance and price. Consider the next motherboard you will buy, will probably not have an AGP slot, so weigh that carefully.

FOGOLD · « **Reply #2 on:** February 16, 2005, 12:38:01 PM »

What Skuzzy says about AGP. Not a good time for making intermediate upgrades!

If you MUST upgrade right now (and your processor prolly could use some beef in the video dept) I'd be tempted to push the boat out and get a top card.

Thats a pretty current CPU.

Nvidia 6800 GT would be excellent.. I wouldn't be tempted by another midrange card, you would be dissapointed with the performance increase, especially for games other than AH .

Nice rigg;)

Siaf__csf · « **Reply #3 on:** February 16, 2005, 01:31:20 PM »

As a related note, are the nvidia cards better on the 2D image quality than they used to be?

I would be extremely cautious while shopping for nvidia because I've had extremely bad experiences with thier rf filtering. It causes your desktop to go blurred with high resolutions.

StarOfAfrica2 · « **Reply #4 on:** February 16, 2005, 02:36:16 PM »

Quote

Originally posted by Siaf__csf
As a related note, are the nvidia cards better on the 2D image quality than they used to be?

I would be extremely cautious while shopping for nvidia because I've had extremely bad experiences with thier rf filtering. It causes your desktop to go blurred with high resolutions.

Than they used to be........when? I've owned a MX 440, MX 4000, and my current FX 5900XT. All of them gave perfectly clear images at up to 1280x1024 resolution. I assume they would be fine beyond that, as they are rated for higher resolutions, but I never use anything higher than that.

humble · « **Reply #5 on:** February 16, 2005, 03:26:11 PM »

I've been very very happy with the X800 pro I bought. Well worth the $'s....

Mak333 · « **Reply #6 on:** February 16, 2005, 04:19:20 PM »

There is always the X850

But i'd stick with an X800...Go with the X800 if you can, its worth the money, don't settle for a 9800 for only a little less...

Skuzzy · « **Reply #7 on:** February 16, 2005, 04:26:25 PM »

Can't get an X850 in an AGP bus form factor.

buzkill · « **Reply #8 on:** February 16, 2005, 06:07:48 PM »

a friend of mine has close to your setup (well,cpu anyway) on a dfi lanparty mobo....his x800 pro pulls avg. of 120fps all the time in AHII.1600x1200 res. high detail i'd go with that

38ruk · « **Reply #9 on:** February 16, 2005, 06:49:49 PM »

i have almost the exact same setup , and i am very pleased with the x800 pro 38

ALF · « **Reply #10 on:** February 16, 2005, 06:56:42 PM »

Quote

Originally posted by buzkill
a friend of mine has close to your setup (well,cpu anyway) on a dfi lanparty mobo....his x800 pro pulls avg. of 120fps all the time in AHII.1600x1200 res. high detail i'd go with that

Moving from the 9600xt, it would be a real waste of money unless you went to at least a geforce 6800 (nice sweet spot in the price per performance as long as you dont run over 1280x1024 res). 6800gt if you like higher resolutions or just want the better fsaa performance.

Either way though, if AH is your only real game to worry about, its quite a chunk O change considering the marginal FR increase you'd be likely to get

Zaphod · « **Reply #11 on:** February 17, 2005, 12:51:02 PM »

Thanks Guys

.

Zaphod

Siaf__csf · « **Reply #12 on:** February 17, 2005, 01:07:17 PM »

Quote

Than they used to be........when?

The last nvidia I've owned was Geforce2. When I bought my first ATI I couldn't believe the difference in 2D image quality.

I still have a Nforce1 board with integrated graphics which is blurry at anything over 800x600.

I've had a TNT2 ultra, Geforce256 and Geforce2 too. They all had really bad IQ which was completely unacceptable at anything over 1024x768.

38ruk · « **Reply #13 on:** February 17, 2005, 01:17:06 PM »

the last 2 nvidia card i had ,a ti 4600 and a 6800 plain version, i still see a difference in 2d quality between them and a x800pro or 9800 pro 38

Skuzzy · « **Reply #14 on:** February 17, 2005, 04:01:40 PM »

Ok,..some explanation in order here.

NVidia has never built thier own video cards, unlike ATI. So what happened was vendors would build NVidia cards, and use cheap RAMDACS which caused poor 2D quality. It also caused poor 3D quality, but most of the games of the day hid it well.

ATI never really suffered this as they always controlled what went into thier video cards. They have always used better quality RAMDAC's than any NVidia card. That is just a simple fact.

Now comes in the NVidia NV30 family (FX5xxx). For all its problems, this chip did one thing for NVidia. They finally built the RAMDAC into the chip. From this point forward NVidia's 2D quality has almost been as good as ATI's. I say almost, as the FX5xxx family did/does still have some noise issues, but nothing like the previous cards.
The FX6xxx family finally got it right and I would say thier 2D quality is about as good as ATI's.