HIS brand video cards

[mubs]

Never heard of them; they're on Newegg. Is this a good brand, quality / reliability wise? They're listed on ATI's site as a partner.

Thanks.

 

[Groltz]

I really like the Arctic Cooling HSF's that come stock on some of their cards.

Can't say I've heard much on their build quality.

 

[time]

HIS (Hightech) has been around for quite a while. I used them a few years ago (before they became an ATI-only shop) because they were better quality than most.

I have one here that was salvaged from a 3 1/2 year old computer; it looks reasonably well made and has a good quality heatsink.

 

[ddrueding]

My next video card will likely be one of their IceQ line of cards. These are the ones Groltz mentioned that use the arctic cooling system to push air straight out of the case.

 

[mubs]

Thank you, gentlemen. I would not have given them a second look if it had not been for their cooling system. Arctic Cooling has a little sidebar (on the left) of their VGA cooling page that features HIS.

I am looking into an X1600 series card, and only HIS comes with the Arctic Cooling cooler pre-installed. I sent an email to Arctic asking when they would release an aftermarket cooler for the X1600, and got a reply that "It is not planned". Since I'm dead-set on exhausting hot air out, that limits me to the HIS if I want an X1600 card. The X1300 would be too weak, and the X1800 too expensive.

What is bothersome, though, is that HIS' warranty is only one year, the lowest common denominator. ATI doesn't appear to make the X1600 itself; seems to be an OEM only GPU. VisionTek offers the longest warranty - lifetime - but don't seem to make any X1k based cards at this time.

Oh, the choices one has to make :evil:

 

[ddrueding]

Look on the bright side, at the speed the GPU industry moves, even if it fails in one year it will be cheap to replace

 

[mubs]

Problem #1: A long warranty is useless if the card dies and you have to go through RMA hell. I'm going through that right now with Gigabyte "I'm a POS" Technology.

Problem #2: I'm not D. "Rich" Drueding. My first name is Pore. Ain't for nuttin that my main system is 5+ years old. This whole business of building a new machine is downright crazy for me, and I'm doing it before sanity returns or the wife finds out what I've already spent and how much more it's going to cost.

 

[Mercutio]

Pore? I thought your first name was Murial.

 

[timwhit]

Problem #1 is most likely to happen. With the prices of computer hardware so cheap these days I haven't bothered with an RMA in quite a while (unless it is a DOA).

A $400-500 video card is another matter though. But, I don't buy things that are that expensive.

 

[Will Rickards]

Poor judgement deceiving the wife.

 

[time]

Mubs, at the risk of being a party pooper, I was under the impression that the X1600 was a bit low on the bang per buck curve.

Anyone else got a comment?

 

[CougTek]

I agree with our Brisbane ambassador. The 6800GS from nVidia offers much higher performances at a similar price point (or maybe 15$-20$ higher, whatever). Of course, it doesn't have the nice video rendering that has been enabled with the latest Catalyst driver though.

Party pooper, that's a stinky expression.

 

[CougTek]

[did a few research]

Ok so maybe the 6800GS cost more like 30$ more than an X1600XT...if you swipe your credit card quickly enough, you won't feel the difference. 189$ for a graphic card isn't the end of the world.

 

[Santilli]

It's REALLY a moving target. Waited for the new release X800XL and X700 ati's, with 256 mb vram, and look where they are now, in what seems like a week......


gs

 

[mubs]

Mubs, at the risk of being a party pooper, I was under the impression that the X1600 was a bit low on the bang per buck curve.

What did you have in mind, Time? I know next to nothing about NVidia GPUs and their performance; I am not a rabid gamer, and it's mostly the gamers that prefer NVidia. I've been an ATI person mostly, and as far as video manufacturers go, am firmly in Merc's camp - the one NVidia card I've had to support have been hell, driver-wise. I still read that ATI has better display quality than NVidia. A further attraction is that the x1k chips are supposed to be quite strong at video encoding/decoding, with rumors of ATI working on software that allows one to use the GPU to encode video. The catch is that this sw works only with the x1k GPUs.

As I said, the X1300s perform poorer that 9600XTs, and the X1800s are very expensive. I seem stuck with the 1600 as far as ATI is concerned. Coug's 6800GS is the same price as the x1600XT Turbo from HIS with integrated Arctic Cooling HSF, so there's no incentive to go with the 6800GS.

If somebody's got a better suggestion, I'm willing to look into it, otherwise looks like an HIS X1600 Pro or XT.

 

[Mercutio]

One think I have to say: I really dislike the fact that pretty much every ATI x1x00 card seems to need active cooling (er, of the models I have seen). I think that's a serious flaw from a reliability standpoint. mubs says he's not a gamer, but the Avivo featureset might be appealing. I think he's looking in the right place, or at least a better one than similarly priced nVidia offerings.
But it really bugs me that there doesn't seem to be a mainstream or conservative choice that doesn't need a fan. Maybe in a couple product refreshes we'll get something like the Radeon 9550 (fanless, but capable enough to do DX9). That's the kind of card I would WANT to put in a machine someone was building to last five years.

 

[mubs]

Sir Mercutio: You haven't looked hard enough!

HIS has a x1300 Pro that is fanless, but I haven't found it anywhere. Maybe it's too new.

This page at Newegg lists 6 x1300 (slower than the Pro version) cards that are fanless.

I think anything faster is too hot to cool passively. I'm looking only at PCI-E cards, and that's what all the ones I linked to are.

 

[theSwede]

There exists at least one fanless X1600XT as well. I have it on order and it should arrive on Thursday or Friday.

http://www.asus.com/products4.aspx?l1=2&l2=8&l3=0&model=961&modelmenu=1

 

[Tannin]

How is it possible to have difficulty with a Nvidia video driver? WTF? You plug the card into the slot, load the Dets, go onto next job. How easy can it get? Seriously, this comment leaves me totally baffled.

(Unless maybe some of the off-brands do weird stuff. If so, I can't say that I've ever had a problem with it. And yes, nearly all our cards are Leadtek, which work first time, every time with the driver CD straight out of the box, but we get heaps of third-party cards come through for repairs and reinstalls and virus removals and so on, and they just work.)

Not counting the highly valued and generally very sensible but on this matter totally irrational and obsessive SF member who's remarks on this topic I naturally discount by conditioned reflex, I am really surprised to read such an odd-ball remark here. I mean, isn't that the whole [i[]point[/i] of using a Nvidia-based card, that you just want the damn thing to work without any fuss, drama, or chicken blood on a moonless night?

 

[mubs]

There exists at least one fanless X1600XT as well. I have it on order and it should arrive on Thursday or Friday.

Thanks, theSwede, great find! If only it wasn't an Asus! Still, I'll take a good look at it.

Sir Tannin, when I made my post I was pretty sure it would evoke a response from you. Apart from said highly valued and generally very sensible but on this matter totally irrational and obsessive SF member, jtr nearly did a coug on an NVidia based card because of driver problems in W98, but he finally solved his problems. I, other the other hand, ain't as smart as he is, so I never solved my problems (in W98 as well) with a made by NVidia GeForce2 MX. Fortunately (or unfortunately, as I will find out today), my POS "dies in 2 months" Gigabyte Radeon 9600XT came back from RMA, so I'll plug it in and see what gives.

And Grammar Poweese, back off. The second sentence in the previous paragraph is long only becaue Tannin used an absurdly long description for He Who Should Have Been Named. Tannin's fault, not mine.

 

[Bozo]

If your not a serious gamer and you are updating your system, why not a motherboard with built in video and a slot for a video card, just in case??


Bozo :mrgrn:

 

[Bozo]

You might look at a MSI RX300HM video card. ATI based, no fan, 128Meg, PCI Express.

http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=321976

Bozo :mrgrn:

 

[mubs]

No go, Bozo. I'm sick and tired of ultra low-end hardware. I want something faster than a 9600XT for my PDFs and photo-editing. I have grand plans for some video work as well. If I'm building a new system, I might as well hit the sweet spot insted of low-balling; that way I'll get to keep the hw for a while. For various reasons, including Avivo, I am looking only at x1k class cards.

 

[mubs]

HIS does not have an office in the USA. Their phone contact number is for Hong Kong! They say the retailer will provide warranty info; neither Monarch nor Newegg has bothered to respond to my inquiries. Screw 'em.

I think I'll go with (gasp!) this Gigabyte card. It's a x1600 Pro with heat-pipe cooling (Merc's grinning). If I need to, I'll duct a fan to suck off the fins of the heat-pipe; at least I have control over fan size / speed / noise / CFM. The price at ZZF is a pleasant surprise. My research shows that the price delta between a x1600 Pro and x1600XT is out of proportion with the speed increase.

 

[Tannin]

I don't get it. What possible advantage can you get from a bigger card for photo editing and PDF viewing, for the love of Mike? I'll back the ultra-ancient 32MB Matrox G400s in my desktop machines to match any of the current mega-wonder cards (in those apps, of course, I'm, not talking for gaming), and a stone-age 8MB S3 Trio wouldn't be far behind. (I'd upgrade the Maxtroxii in a flash if I thought it would make any difference, but it won't, so why spend the money?)

 

[Mercutio]

Two things:
1. mubs has stated his interest in the mutlimedia-cleanup and co-processing of ATI's avivo tools, which are only present in X1x00-series hardware.
2. Just reaching, but maybe mubs will be one of those funny people who will run Vista. Vista needs a pretty powerful graphics card, and as I understand it, nothing Matrox makes qualifies.

 

[Tannin]

If we are talking video editing, that's different, of course. But for PDFs and photographs, it's pointless. You could measure a difference[/i] but you'd never see it in real life.

 

[mubs]

Tannin, you're so used to fast machines you have no idea what it's like to have a slow one.

I have large Word docs that take time to scroll and kill the machine on repagination (I turn off repagination till I'm done editing). I have one page PDFs that are agonizingly slow to scroll. There are web pages that bring my machine to a screeching halt, for seconds at a time. Video card is a Radeon 9000 w/ 64MB in an AGP 1x/2x slot. 2 x P3-800. 1 GB RAM. 2 x Seagate 160MB ST316002. The bottleneck is video card / processor / bus speed.

If you're building a new machine, would you put "a stone-age 8MB S3 Trio" in it? Or would you go with the then sweet-spot? My current m/c is 5+ years old, and I plan on keeping the new one that long. Only way I can do that is to start off with a decent config. Cripes, I'm not talking about putting in an X1900 XT, am I? That card is about $600. The x1600 Pro I'm looking at is $120. The x1600, by any stretch of the imagination, is considered a "mid-range" card, not a performance GPU.

By "bigger card" if you mean video memory, that's what they come with, there is no option to go with less.

You'll most certainly lose your wager that the "ultra-ancient 32MB Matrox G400s in my desktop machines will match any of the current mega-wonder cards in those apps".

There are people that say a Celeron 500 MHz will do for word processing and web browsing. Maybe that would be true for a neophyte. Not for anybody that comes to this forum.

As for your last point, "If we are talking video editing, that's different, of course. But for PDFs and photographs, it's pointless. You could measure a difference but you'd never see it in real life", we'll just have to disagree. You obviously have never sat there waiting for a photograph to rotate right, or for some editing to "take hold".

I think the only person here who knows anything about the Radeon x1xxx GPU is Merc, for he's the only one who saw my reasoning immediately and understood it.

Have a drink on me. A round of drinks for everybody! Cheers!

 

[Mercutio]

Actually, I know your pain, mubs.

The AGP slot on my work computer died some months ago (remember how I said that I have an AGP card that kills AGP slots? Now you know how I figured that out). I don't particularly feel like RMAing the motherboard to Albatron when I really don't NEED a Radeon9700 for my job.

So I installed a 32MB PCI Radeon 7000.

For the most part, it really is FINE.

But scrolling through a 50 page PDF or Word Doc, refreshing the screen in Azureus or hell, reading a .CBR (comic book, which are usually 150 or 300dpi 2000xwhatever JPGs), I can REALLY tell that I don't have a fast card any more.

 

[Tannin]

You'll most certainly lose your wager that the "ultra-ancient 32MB Matrox G400s in my desktop machines will match any of the current mega-wonder cards in those apps".

You obviously have never sat there waiting for a photograph to rotate right, or for some editing to "take hold".

You are right: I never have to wait for a photograph to rotate right, or for some editing to "take hold". Never. Oh, except on my laptop where I have some other application maxing out the hard drive already. And do you know what I run?

Athlon XP 2500s, 512MB or better, 32MB video cards so old that they were the best ones Matrox made at that time - I'm talking previous century here.
Pentium M 1.6 laptop with some crapola ATI embedded video chip

I used to run a 2.0 Celeron laptop with embedded Intel shared-memory graphics, and even that coped perfectly well with the type of graphics tasks you just mentioned.

For rotating a photograph or waiting for some editing to take hold, we are not talking video performance - this is all about CPU, bus, and RAM. Any video card made in the last five years will do this stuff without even getting warmed up. For non-motion graphics, video cards are irrelevant. That's why I haven't upgraded my Matrox cards in ... oh ... I don't know, when did the G400 come out? 1999? I could plug in the latest, greatest, and it wouldn't make the slightest difference. Indeed, not so long ago I did exactly that: plugged in a $600 video card instead of the G400 as I needed to test if it was faulty or not. (It wasn't.) Net performance result? Null. Zero. Zip. Nada.

(Obviously, I am not a gamer. Nor do I care for video.)

 

[Mercutio]

I find it ironic when Tannin mentions "crapola ATI" when he's talking about a pure 2D display.

Just so we're all clear:

Matrox 2D > ATI 2D >>> nVidia 2D = S3 2D

nvidia 2D quality is ass. And Tannin knows it.

 

[mubs]

Alright Tannin, I admit defeat .

Since the new motherboard doesn't have an AGP slot, I can't use my fossilized Matrox Millenium 8MB AGP 1x card.

I'm forced to buy a PCI-E card, cheapest I can find is an MSI GeForce 6200 TurboCache 256MB TV-out/DVI for $45 shipped (yea, it's an NVidia!).

But if I rummage hard enough, though, I might find a PCI card in a box I've saved, and the new motherboard does have 3 PCI slots. Or I could splurge $18 for an ATI Rage XL 8MB PCI (but it's an ATI, damn).

I'm absolutely certain I have a VESA local bus card in a box somewhere, but I suspect cramming it into a non-compatible slot may damage a pin or two.

Tough choices.

 

[Tannin]

"Crappola ATI" because it took something like 12 months and six or eight different iterations of the useless bloody drivers to stop my laptop crashing doing nothing ore difficult than viewing JPGs. There have been several driver releases since, but I'm afraid to try them now that I've finally got one that actually works.

Crappola in this context because I don't know how powerful it is relative to, e.g., a typical midrange Gforce 6600GT, but assume, seeing it is in a laptop and has 64MB, that it's very slow by desktop standards. Something better than UMA card but around the same as a Gforce FX5100 or some such. The point, of course, is that for the exclusively 2D workload it has, it is vastly more than powerful enough. Indeed, I'd rather have had the integrated Intel video except that I wanted some other features that came bundled, i.e., Firewire. At least the drivers would probably have worked.

 

[Tannin]

How long since you actually used a Nvidia card for 2D Merc? The poor quality they used to have was a long, long time ago - back around the time I bought the G400s, in fact. They atended to that around about the time the Gforce III came out. Or maybe it was the Gforce II, I forget. There is no, repeat zero difference in IQ between the Leadtek Nvidia cards I've tried and the G400s - which are generally regarded as as good as it gets. I use a Mitsubishi 22 inch monitor, remember, so I'm in a position to see any difference, but there isn't any. Maybe cheap brand Nvidia cards have poor 2D, I wouldn't know. Don't use them if I can help it. Leadtek all the way for me.

 

[Mercutio]

As in all things Laptop, there is the creep of "proprietary". Most laptops with ATI chips - and I've run into enough mobile nvidia chips that are the same way - only work correctly with manufacturer-supplied drivers. ATI has a very short list of notebook brands that work correctly with its standard set of Catalyst drivers.

You could've saved a lot of frustration, though, if you'd asked for a little help. Although ATI's standard drivers seldom work on major-brand notebooks, most laptops with ATI graphics can use the non-official Omega Drivers just fine.

 

[Mercutio]

How long since you actually used a Nvidia card for 2D Merc?

I maintain some fairly new laptops for a client that have Geforce something-or-others in them. Every once in a while someone brings me a Dell-something-or-other that's broken somehow, and about 1/4 of my classroom machines have whatever-the-hell5200s in them, due to the tragic error of letting a fucking moron who wasn't me do the ordering that day.

The last time I used an nvidia card as a 2D display on a computer I own and therefore spent longer than, say, an hour at, was probably an original Geforce card. I was otherwise using 3dfx or Matrox cards at the time, and using that card after using a G200 always made me feel like my glasses needed cleaning.

Subjectively, at a modest 1024x768@75Hz or so, the 5200s are about on par with the S3 Unichrome. I'm used to that. I don't think it looks BAD, per se, but a Radeon 7000 makes a bit nicer picture, particularly on an LCD with ClearType turned on. To me, that difference becomes more pronounced if I scoot the resolution up from there; at 1280x1024, the difference from 5200 to 7000 is big enough that I can point it out to my students.

Do nvidia cards get less crappy if they're plugged into DVI or something?

 

[Tannin]

I wonder if it might be a brand implementation thing, Merc, as I never notice any diference in display quality between different cards these days (not counting UMA, of course). On the other hand, we practically only ever use Leadtek cards. Our best-selling card by a long way is a weird one that was remaindered in large quantaties until we bought the last box of them, a Leadtek 128MB FX5200 with - and here is the reason no-one else wanted to buy them - a DVI output and no normal VGA. (But they shipped with a DVI to VGA converter plug in the box, so they are perfetly OK with CRT monitors too.) Sold a heap of those. Then we sell a reasonable number of Leadtek 6600GTs ... and that is essentially that. Anything else is a one-off or a two off, and only a few times a year.

Yes, we get heaps of otherwise equipped systems come in for repairs and etc., but they only get plugged into the workshop monitors, which are far from state of the art: all CRT, mostly 17 inch, one or two of the better quality 15 inch ones remain, and a couple of them have weird colour problems which make them unsalable but perfectly usable for what we do on them - mostly the eternal round of Spybot, Hijackthis, Ad-Aware and Housecall. Hell, they probably spend more time in Safe Mode than normal mode.

Damn it, I didn't know there were alternative drivers for ATI. I didn't ask because I didn't actually know it was a video driver problem, just suspected that it might be the cause. (Largely because I tend to blame ATI for everything from sunspots on down to your sister's acne.) But everytime there as a new driver released (always the official one from IBM) I tried it, more in hope than expectation. And one day, hey presto, the problem was gone. So I only actually knew it was an ATI driver problem after I'd fixed it.

Next time I have a 6600GT going, I'll do a quick A/B comparo with a 5200 on a good TFT or maybe my big Mitsu 22. But I'll be surprised to see anything. Worth checking though.

 

[CougTek]

Nvidia's 2D problem have been serious up to the GeForce 3 Titanium and the GeForce 4. After those, their 2D has been ok. Not Matrox-like, but acceptable. Before the GeForce 3 Titanium, it was aweful from 1280x1024 and up. That was in 2002 IIRC.

Since, it's been 3D quality that has differed from ATI and Nvidia. For 2D, they are virtually the same. Perhaps some low-end cards have lesser 2D quality, but that would be because the manufacturers don't follow Nvidia's reference design.

 

[Sol]

I'm resurecting this thread to get some opinons on this HIS x1300 video card. I'm thinking about getting one for my tv box which currently has a gforce2 mx200 card in it. My hope is that the extra video processing grunt in the x1xxx series cards might keep the system alive a bit longer than it otherwise would.
It won't be playing games or anything but I'd like to be able to chuck linux (probably kubuntu or kororaa) on the box since generally I've found it to be a fair bit more efficient when dealing with video (plus the more I use linux the less I'll need Windows).

Does anyone know if the video decoding/encoding acceleration will work in linux?

 

[ddrueding]

I'd doubt it. But look on the bright side, you could crossfire a pair of these!