Budget Gaming Card Conundrum

[Mercutio]

I've got a couple of PCs set aside in my office for people to play LAN games on.

AthlonXP 3200
Athlon64 3000
P4C 2400 (Thanks Clocker!)

Each has 512MB RAM and... nothing in its AGP slot at the moment.

Now, these are PCs that probably won't be heavily used for much of anything but game playing (I might appropriate one as my new "office machine", but still).

So I find myself needing to pick up some decent video cards for PCs I more-or-less don't care about and certainly don't want to spend more money than I have to.

9600 Pro? Well, those are nice and the one I'd buy is fanless, for $112.
The Albatron board used by the Athlon64 has issues with 9600s (about once in every 10 boots, it won't detect an AGP card... but it doesn't have those problems with 9200s, 9700s, 9800s )

9550? Do these things work OK for gaming? $60 would be a cheap solution... for that matter, $70 for a 9600 SE would, too.

X600 Pro? I don't know much about them, except that a 9800 Pro smokes them. Price is decent... $125 or so.

nVidia 5700? It's an nVidia card, which would be against my religion, but it's apparently in the same price/performance range, so I'll mention that they are also about $120.

 

[Handruin]

How's the 9550 compare to the 9500 Pro? If it's similar, the performace is not bad for most games. I'm using a 9500 Pro with my XP 2200+ and the only game that gives me performance issues is Doom 3.

Keep in mind I don't typically enable FSAA, and for most games I try to run at 1280x1024. Doom 3 being the exception, I run it at 1024x768 and I get 24 FPS or less in many cases.

 

[ddrueding]

Does the albatron not like any 9600s? Or just the Pro version? The 9600Pro Ultimate Edition is my favorite card in this segment, but the plain 9600 is fanless, incredibly cool running and does alright in games as well.

 

[Buck]

You can always refer back to this article.

 

[Mercutio]

I did, Buck, but it doesn't include some of the newer cards available.

Yes, David, the Albatron board appears to have problems with both 9600XTs and 9600 Pros.

 

[The JoJo]

OT: Merc, how about putting folding@home as a service on those comps?

 

[The JoJo]

This is about the only thing wort looking at at Tom's these days. This is the new video card survey:

http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20041004/index.html

 

[Clocker]

You can get a 9500 non-Pro and run W1zzards softmode like I do to make it a 9700...cheap and effective solution.

http://www.techpowerup.com/softmod/
C

 

[Mercutio]

<sniff>

<sob sob sob>

<Waaaaaaaaaaaaaah>

I was offered - by one of my students, no less - an nvidia FX5900 (aka Leafblower) - for $125 last night. Just, out of the blue: "I just got a 6800 Ultra. Do you know anyone who wants a 5900?"

Of course, I hate nvidia with a dark passion and frequently reference its employees in the same breath as IRS auditors and child molesters.

On the other hand, it'd be a shame to turn the damned thing down given my needs at the moment.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAArrrrgh. Why couldn't it be a 9800?!?

Also, bahngeist suggested newegg's refurbed cards. Mostly the discounts aren't that appealing, but finding $50 9600s certainly does make this easier.

 

[Mercutio]

OT: Merc, how about putting folding@home as a service on those comps?

Two things: One is that I've found it to be a royal pain in my ass to determine if the folding client is actually doing anything, if it's just running and waiting for a server response or something. I've had machines that I thought were folding, that actually were doing nothing for, well, months.
If someone wrote a decent Management client for large numbers of folding PCs, I'd think about it.

Second, these PCs won't even be turned on very often. A couple times a week, maybe, for a couple hours at a time.

It seems like a waste but unless someone wants to buy them I just don't have any more places to put computers around my house. Even my garage is full right now. Hopefully I'll sell them in time (except the P4, which I plan to keep just to have a P4 sitting around).

 

[CougTek]

9600 Pro? Well, those are nice and the one I'd buy is fanless, for $112.

Who makes fanless Radeon 9600 Pro?

I can easily find fanless Radeon 9600, but not fanless Radeon 9600 Pro.
I think a Radeon 9600 or 9600 Pro is the fastest fanless graphic card one can current buy (unless using a 30$ Zalman bulky heatsink, that is).

...The fan on the smallish heatsink of my Radeon 9500 has died (well, still turns but makes obnoxious noise).

 

[timwhit]

Instead of starting a new thread, I will just ask here. What is the fastest card to get without a fan (nVidia or ATI I don't have a preference)?

I'm looking to play a bit of Half Life 2. Would this play very well with an ATI 9600 128MB or 256MB?

Is there a real difference between 128MB and 256MB?

This card doesn't look like a bad deal for a 128MB 9600 with no fan.

 

[Handruin]

I thought HL2 played rather well on my 9500 Pro 128 with an athlon XP 2200+ @1280x1024. So I'd guess it would play fine on the 9600. If not you could kick it down to 1024x768 or 800x600.

 

[timwhit]

What is the difference between a 9500 Pro an a 9600 non-pro? My LCD runs at 1280x1024 native so I would like to run it at that resolution.

I probably won't play it all that much, but I would like it to run nicely when it does. CPU is an Athlon64 3000 if that matters.

 

[mubs]

Tim,

I had saved some info from ATI's web site a while back. I have no info on the 9500, but the only differences in the 9600 family are as follows:

PRODUCT NAME            RADEON 9600 XT      RADEON 9600 PRO 128MB     RADEON 9600 128MB
------------------    ------------------    ---------------------    -------------------
MHz, engine/memory         500e/600m               400e/600m             325e/400m
Pixel Fillrate          2.0 Gpixels/sec         1.6 Gpixels/sec       1.3 Gpixels/sec
Geometry Rate         250 Mtriangles/sec      200 Mtriangles/sec    162.5 Mtriangles/sec

 

[Handruin]

* RADEON® 9500 PRO
* 275 MHz engine clock
* 540 MHz memory speed 128-bit DDR
* 2200 Mpixels/s
* 2200 Mtexels/s
* Peak memory bandwidth (GB/s) 8.6
* 8 Pixel pipelines

I'm reading mixed reviews that the 9500 pro is faster than the 9600/9600 Pro. I think the game will still run OK. Your CPU is faster than mine, so that should help a bit. You might be better off with a pro or XT, but they probably all have fans.

 

[CougTek]

The Radeon 9500 Pro has 8 pixel pipelines versus 4 for the entire 9600 flavors. Handruin's right when he writes that the 9500 Pro is faster than the 9600 Pro. I think the Radeon 9600XT is about on par with the 9500 Pro though.

 

[timwhit]

Why the hell can't ATI make the higher number card faster than the slower number card?

Can I get a 9500 Pro without a fan?

 

[CougTek]

I finally bought a 9550 not-SE (got one with 128bit memory bus) and 256MB of RAM. I know there won't be any difference between the 128MB and the 256MB version of the 9550, but they were at the same price, so...

Got it for 110$CDN with free shipping, so I don't feel that I made a bad deal. 110$CDN is worth roughly 90U$, so it isn't that bad.

 

[Mercutio]

Newegg sells the fanless 128MB, 128-bit Gigabyte 9550 Pro for $60.
I can't tell any meaningful difference between a 9550 Pro and a $40-more-expensive 9600 Pro.

They work with my Albatron K8X800 Pro IIs as well (which refuse to boot with a 9600 in their AGP slots).

I have purchased 3 of them.

The only problem I have had so far has been upgrading one of my Athlon 64 machines from a PCI S3 Virge (don't laugh, it's a "spare parts" box I use for classroom work) to a 9550. The machine in question runs 2003 Server.

After installing the full set of the latest Catalyst drivers, rebooting and logging back in, something called ATI SmartGART spawned a program called "CLI.EXE" which ran at 99% CPU utilization (on an A64/3200!) in High Thread Priority, which consumed approximately 75MB of RAM per minute until the PC started throwing "Out of Virtual Memory errors" (at that point it was using about 2.5GB of RAM between memory and swap space) and eventually BSOD'd the machine. I let it do that twice.

A little reading suggested that CLI.EXE was a .NET application and that SmartGART was trying to interact with DirectX. I used cat-uninstaller to remove the .NET dependant drivers and installed the smaller "full" package. There is no directX uninstaller for 2003 Server, not even a hack.

CLI still ran after I rebooted, so I ghosted the machine back to its default state and used the smaller "low bandwidth" install packages to set up the 9550.

And now it works fine. I don't know what was wrong but 2003 Server isn't NORMALLY home to directX anything (video acceleration and sound are disabled by default!) or midrange gaming cards, so I'm not too worried about it.