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"Once More Someone Asks..."

...does anyone have any suggestions for a suitable graphics card upgrade?

My system is;

2.6GHZ Intel P4 with HT
512MB RAMM @ 400mhz
Creative Soundblaster Live 5.1 Digital
80GB HD
ATI RADEON 9800 AGP card
19" LCD Flat Panel

The system is less than a year old and at the time it only cost £80 to upgrade it to the Radeon 9800 instead of onboard...I did wonder at the time why the only retail version of the card had PRO on the end of them, but I figured it would be a similar card. Big mistake, but because until recently I've only played older games like Raven Shield and Delta Force Blackhawk Down I haven't had a problem. Then Battlefield Vietnam and UT2004,along with Far Cry ,coupled with the mention of the Radeon 9800SE card in PCFormat and PC Gamer, exposed the card for the steaming pile of excrement it is...

Yup, my Radeon 9800 is an SE, or more aptly, crap and, with a core speed of 324 and a memory clock speed of 290, little better than the sub £50 cards in the Special Reserve Catalogue.

So I'm in search of a new card because I figure that, with the above system, my card is really holiding me back, right? Bit more memory would be nice but right now I'd wager the only thing holding me back from the high settings on most modern and future games is this silly Radeon card.

I'm looking to spend a max of £150-£200

I'm tempted to go to Nvidia for the first time in years (every PC I have had or card I have bought has been ATI but after this, and the fact most new games seem to be built around this Nvidia "Way it's meant to be played" thing).

Any suggestions? I'm guessing the best deals are online but I really want a boxed retail card. The XFX GEFORCE FX 5900 XT in SR at 149.99 looks good....is it?

And before anyone suggests this, I've scanned through pages and pages of guides and read magazine reviews of cards but there are so many to choose from :(

Ya it's done pretty good in the Ut2003 and Aquamark (whatever that is) benchmarks.. it's a pretty good darn card as i said.

*looks at Silent Scope's "Tom's Hardware" link*

*sees 5900XT rated below his current card*

Aiiiieeee....

Ah.... I'm at a total loss, I think I'll just keep this card a while longer.

Yep, I read that about Fast Writes as well, I've been using the Omega Drivers with FW off and it makes no difference to 3D Mark or actual games.

I've done some more research on the Geforce 5900XT and apparently it also has 8 of these pipeline things and is 256 bit as well. I had to de-clock back quite a bit because what I thought was stable, well, wasn't - the UT2004 demo started getting artifacts and stuff and it has never done so before. I think I'm going to take a leap and go for the 5900XT.

I know that with a bit of extra cooling or other jiggerypokery I might be able to get similar performance with this card but I paid for a 3 year service contract and whilst adding/removing parts does not invalidate it, adding parts to overclock stuff will if anything goes wrong - seen a fair few shots on the web of clocked cards reduce to melted sludge taking the PC with them. This PC is often left downloading etc so I can't really have a chance of something going wrong whilst it's by its lonesome.

Fast writes do little to improve performace i read somewhere... that omega forum thingy anyway.

Stranger In Paradise wrote:
The problems are nearly always momentary freezes in the
> screen and general choppiness at high settings. The guy reckoned that
> just 512MB could be pushing it in terms of memory and that the
> problems could be caused by the fact that textures and stuff are
> loaded from memory? Idea anyone?
>

The PC world guy MIGHT be right about the memory but for the wrong reasons, in that the memory might be causing a bottleneck if commands to the graphics card are being passed through RAM.

Try enabling "AGP Fast Writes" if it isnt already enabled and make sure the AGP speed setting is at the highest setting in the ATI control panel, the fast write option (as I understand it) means that commands to the VPU are transffered directly from the CPU without having to trickle in and out of RAM...

Hmmm well...

Spent the afternoon fiddling around with the card and Rad Clocker/Linker and many many tests on the demo of 3DMark 2003. The core seems to run okay at 342 and the memory clock at 324, anything above those and you get artifacts, ripping and general nastiness. But, and this is a big but, I have no idea what this is doing heat wise to the card...it has an onboard fan and that's still okay so I'm guessing that, what with the PC booting and everything, heat wise it is okay, so far.

Still not all that happy at the idea clocking it could end up bringing the whole PC down with it if something goes seriously wrong.

And, whilst talking to a strangely knowledgeable staffie at PC World, I'm wondering if my current graphical woes are actually memory related? The problems are nearly always momentary freezes in the screen and general choppiness at high settings. The guy reckoned that just 512MB could be pushing it in terms of memory and that the problems could be caused by the fact that textures and stuff are loaded from memory? Idea anyone?

Gah, I hate trying to sort out PC Upgrades like this, I could spend 60 on another 512MB of memory and find it makes no difference, I could buy a 150 card to find the problem is the memory...and on and on... Ideally I'd buy memory and a card, but it has to be one or the other !

Microchips wrote:
> I'm going to wait for the new PCI Express cards to come out, and
> upgrade my MoBo at the same time

Not a bad idea.

I'm going to wait for the new PCI Express cards to come out, and upgrade my MoBo at the same time

It's just 20mhz memory clock rate less than the 9700pro.. it's better than the 9600XT anyway.

Man, this sucks.

There's me wondering why I'm not getting an amazing graphical response with a 9800 to find out that it has a core clock of 324 and a memory clock of 290... That's pitiful...

I can't wait until I get a new one *curses*