Is this card good?

[jbennet]

http://www.dabs.com/ProductView.aspx?Quicklinx=45L1&CategorySelectedId=11137&PageMode=1&NavigationKey=11137,366360000,4294956286,12,4294963789&InMerch=1

is it good?

i currently have a 256 meg ATI x600

i want better performace and res in farcry and battlefield 2

[Xpenetrator]

The prices for a X800pro or Geforce 7600GS are not much higher (+ 10 Pounds) ) and they are the current much recommended entry level cards with a half-decent performance. But the older x1600 is not that much slower (approx. on GF6600GT-level) and would help with the mentioned games for sure. They're all running DDR-II memory on a 128Bit interface and you should know that this doesn't help utilizing more than 256MB very efficiently. (Your link shows a 256MB card, but the description says "512MB")

[jbennet]

so is the x1600 worse than the x800? i thaught the bigger the number the better?

i like ATI cards myself i have a motherboard that seemingy hates nvidia hardware

How many pounds is an PCI-X x16 x800 Pro?

My current card is an x600 256 meg DDR2 hypermemory (i think that means it takes another 256 from the system ram to use as vram am i rite?)

The x600 runs BF2 absolutely fine at low/med graphics and 1024x768 and the same for fracry

bascally i want a card which will improve this performance a bit - so is the x800pro my bet then? i wanty ideally to spend under £90 for a 256 or 512 meg card

[Xpenetrator]

so is the x1600 worse than the x800? i thaught the bigger the number the better?

That's what many people thought when they sold their GF4200-4800 and purchased a GF 5xxx series card...:mrgreen: Even though the x1600pro has newer technology (DX9c vs. DX9b support), the performance is lower due to chip/mem clock. The two (for gamers) remaining GPU companies do a lot to confuse the customer with countless XL/Pro/GT/GTO/...(infinite) versions of their chips and the card manufacturers make it even worse by producing overclocked and stripped card versions from these chips.

i like ATI cards myself i have a motherboard that seemingy hates nvidia hardware

Unfortunately, it's not that easy to predict if a card will behave well on your mobo or not - just from the manufacturer's name. The problem is the dependance between the GPU and the mobo chipset and the BIOSses both employ, plus some stuff in between. And some mobos even have rather general problems (i.e. with standards - historic example: 'AGP8x' -boards that never really supported AGP8x).

How many pounds is an PCI-X x16 x800 Pro?

Good question - I never put one on a scale :) And I meant a GTO, not a Pro, sorry - my bad. Dunno... over here they start slightly above 100€, but average prices for them just raised a lot and that's 125€ now. X-mas is coming....

My current card is an x600 256 meg DDR2 hypermemory (i think that means it takes another 256 from the system ram to use as vram am i rite?)

Yes, "hypermemory" is a technology that "increases the affordability" (Ati) (Means it substitutes expensive fast video memory with your (relative) slow system memory. With today's memory sizes, this is all sales gibberish and doesn't help performance, since memory bandwith is still more important than it's size.)

The x600 runs BF2 absolutely fine at low/med graphics and 1024x768 and the same for fracry [...] bascally i want a card which will improve this performance a bit - so is the x800pro my bet then? i wanty ideally to spend under £90 for a 256 or 512 meg card

That's a concrete idea! And this is what the x1600Pro and the x800GTO both will do (I guess). At least from Far Cry I can tell from experience, that this class of cards will allow you to kick it all up two notches - I (GF7600GS) ran FC with everything on "very high", btw not that smashing difference. Hard to give you a good advice - on a typical comparison chart your x600 is on position 60 and a x1600pro is on pos. 37, a x800GTO is on place 31. Try to read a zillion reviews about cards with these chips and go for the best quality/support/OC-ability maybe...

[jbennet]

yeah i may get the x800 as im not worrries about new standards like vista or shader 3.0 - christmas is coming so ill get it then

basically i just want BF2 and FarCry and HL2 which run fine already i just want better graphics. I can currently run farcy/bf2 in low OR medium at 1024x768 (or 1280x1024 with small lag) but medium makes the games randomy crash my system with "serious error". i think its overheating so if i get an x800 pro i suppose ill have to get an exhaust or something

ive seen one:

x800 pro/gt something 256 meg "hypermemory" PCI-X x16

that was £95 with a free F.E.A.R disc (although i doubt it will actuall run fear)

[Xpenetrator]

medium makes the games randomy crash my system with "serious error". i think its overheating so if i get an x800 pro i suppose ill have to get an exhaust or something

Yes you mentioned some probs in the other thread - as you know, the reason for that can be pretty much everything including compatability issues, but that (occurring under high load only) points to high temperature or lack of power.
Are these the only games that show that problem or are these the only games you play? I ask because almost every big game has issues with certain graphics driver versions or even with whole card/GPU series. Some of them show only up with certain settings and FC switches shader models and other key technologies by just selecting 'low', 'med' or 'high details', just like many other games. I guess this can mislead one to think of bad hardware. AFAIR there were quite some issues with drivers and cards from ATi *and* nVidia cards in FC and some ATIs had problems with certain detail levels. There are some FC-forums out there that are a good resource on that.

that was £95 with a free F.E.A.R disc (although i doubt it will actuall run fear)

Would not be the first card that's bundled with demos, claiming "free games" on the carton. I'll cross my fingers for you....:cheesy:

[jbennet]

yeah well my x600 came with FarCry full version so maybe

yeah i get random crashes with facrcy, sometimes with BF2 although thats most often screen corruption. Old software also causes similar screen corrupsion

[Xpenetrator]

What kind of corruption? Artifacts? (bleeding, texture errors, funny colors at some spots?) Stripes? Black screen?

[jbennet]

sometimes textures become grey
sometimes black screen
sometimes lines or crackling round edge of screen or stripes
sometimes it goes inverted colours

sometimes i power off the pc and when i reboot it quickly flashes up with like a stripey distorted screenshot of something i was doing least time i was on

I got a custom dell BTX case - big air cooling, basically the front of the case is a vent and the mobo is like on the bottom in an exhaust thing. Its also inside a desk and the gfx card is next to my wifi so maybe its overheating

[Xpenetrator]

Hmmm... the "visual effects" sound pretty much like a driver problem. Which Catalyst driver do you use?
Unfortunately, the x600 has no temperature sensor AFAIK to check if that's the problem.
Are you familiar with ATiTool or similar programs? You could try _under_clocking your GPU a bit to test if temperature is the problem. My second thought after "driver/DirectX/chipset driver issue" would be "video RAM gone bad" and by underclocking your video RAM, you could try to rule that out, too. Has it always been this way or did it work when it was new?

[jbennet]

the catalyst installer is labeleed "6-10_xp-2k_dd_ccc_wdm_enu_36790.exe" in control centre it says version 1.2.2560.36742

its whatever the newish one is (lasdt 4 months i reinstalled the os)
and no i get these bugs with all catalyst drivers and yes i have tried underclocking

[Xpenetrator]

and no i get these bugs with all catalyst drivers and yes i have tried underclocking

That's pretty evil...I don't dare to ask if that happens on a freshly installed system... Makes me think even more that either the card appears to be defective or your board has a problem. I guess your BIOS is fresh enough, too. But that would mean the problem vanishes into the trashcan or eBay :) as soon you've got your new video card...

Here's some randomly chosen and slightly outdated performance review for ATI cards with FC as benchmark: http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/230/9 (Scroll down the page for the "high detail" tests - the differences are pretty impressive)

[jbennet]

it does on a fresh system and it came factory installed in a newish dell thats neraly 1 years old. Maybe the card is defective? i cant get a new mobo as its a damn custom BTX one

[Xpenetrator]

Maybe the card is defective?

The only way to get sure about that would be to test another, similar card in your computer or your card in another computer. The symptoms are not *that* conclusive. I hope it's the card and not the mainboard.

it came factory installed in a newish dell thats neraly 1 years old

Then this should be covered by warranty?

BTW, nice avatar :cheesy: "Yyyyaaaaaaaahhhhh! Make way for Willie!" (And HP is in deep mourning today...:sad: :mrgreen: )

[jbennet]

well its only ever really when im playing games, the machine works fine otherwise which means that if it its the mainboard then at least ill still have a pc that works for day to day things (its warranty just ran out) and i loked at motherboards, seemingly intel are the only ones who do BTX ones but now all thier models are mostly not compatiible with my CPU and are like £250

[Xpenetrator]

well its only ever really when im playing games,

I know, it's always that way* - but the symptoms always differ slightly and yours don't point so much to a mobo/BIOS issue for me. But I can be proven wrong. :) What chipset does this Dell have? (Which Dell is it?) 4 eyes find more on Google than 2...

* A bad chip may show its surprises under load only or a weak area/function on the chip's die may be unused until you start a 3D app. like a game. But this can also be a bad BIOS implementation regarding that function or a bug in the game, the driver or maybe cosmic rays (noooo...). That's the hell of a complex stuff and that's what makes troubleshooting so annoying and interesting...:cheesy:

[jbennet]

its an intel BTX motheboard (cant be many of them)