Sorry to annoy, but radeon 9700pro vs Geforce 6600?

yes the 6600 is better its equal or maybe a little bit better than the Radean 9800. but what would you need to upgrade for?

Hold up!

Guy's, he's talking about a Gefore 6600, not a Geforce 6600 GT!

A 6600 GT would be a bit better than a 9700 PRO, but a 6600 WOULDN'T BE AS GOOD AS A 9700 pro! It's a downgrade... at best, they're equal!

Don't waste your money on a 6600!!!

And don't get anything less than an X800 GTO or 6800 GS. Anything less isn't really worth the upgrade from a 9700 PRO... the 9700 PRO is still a decent card compared to the low end stuff, unless you have a newer PCI express system.

lol. Trust you? Dude, I wrote the graphics beginner's guide for Tom's Hardware...

The 9700 PRO and the 6600 BOTH have 8 pipelines, dude.

The difference is, the 6600 has a 128-bit memory interface, the 9700 PRO has a 256-bit memory interface... TWICE the bandwidth at the same clockspeeds.

The only reason the 6600 GT performs better is because it's clockspeeds are so high (500 mhz core and 500 mhz memory)

The vanilla 6600 has much lower clockspeeds, 320 core and 275 memory... the 9700 PRO's 325core/310 memory will eat it alive, mostly because it's 310 Mhz memory at 256-bits is the equivalent of 620 Mhz memory at 128-bit.

At best, the 6600 might be able to keep up because it has a newer architecture, but it sure as hell isn't an UPGRADE.

Trust me... I know. 8)

You're telling Cleeve that he doesn't know what he's talking about?...

Both 8 pipeline cards but the 6600 overclocks very well, as the GPU is the same as the 6600GT, and the 6600 will have massively better shader performance and therefore should be much better in modern games.

As a comparison, I've tested a 6600 at stock against a 5950U at 510/1050 (quite a bit over stock) and while the 5950U beats it by a reasonable margin at older games, (as it can push out 8 pixels per clock as long as its a multitextured game, and it is clocked ALOT higher than either the 6600 or 9700pro), the 6600 is massively faster at more modern, shader intensive games.

Most 6600's will do 425+ on the core without too much pushing, even more with a voltmod.

Still, I wouldnt spend the money on going from a 9700pro to a 6600. I'd save the few bucks more for a 6600GT, 6800GS, or an x800/850.

are you serious?

*n00bs look away, the following is humour for those who know enough to know what I'm talking about*
[sarcasm]


Wait so what if the 'R9700Pro' is really a Sapphire OEM (Outhouse Edition Man!) design with 128bit memory, it's only SM2.0B--- while the GF6600 is SM3.0++~+ (is there a 4th pluse or is that the GMA950?), and there's some lint in the HSF, AND it has 128MB of memory versus the 512 of the suppah GF6600, I mean C'mon it OWNZ on the 512MB alone !!!


[/sarcasm]

Yeah, and that looks like a good price too (although don't have much on UK pricing to compare it to).

Yep.

What, is it that hard to believe?

X800XT>X800GTO

cool, looks like the x800 xt it is. I did see a "re-certified" 7800gs on newegg for 205. with warranty, so maybe next week if thats still there, I may grab that instead. Anyway, thanks for the input, I was disappointed at the performance in CoD2 with the R9800pro, so these should get me back in action.
Thanks

What about the 7600 GS as an option? i've seen it on new egg for $132. Wouldn't that be better than the 6600 and a step below the 7800?

please read the whole thread before posting as it helps avoid looking like a dumbass.

OP wants best performance for £80, I post THE card that gives the best performance for under £80, I fail to see this hidden extra content that I seem to be missing where posting exactly the info the OP wants makes me a dumbass?

You sound like the guy from the computer nerd skit from SNL. A few posters miss some minor details from the thread and you elevate yourself to some godlike status because you had the time to read all the details of the entire thread. Loser!

TAKE the time before posting a reply. If you don't then expect sillyness like the above.

FAQin' n00bs!

Yup, I agree, but overclocking the GPU definately helps in modern shader intensive games imo.

The 5950U wasnt all that bad. See Here.

In 3Dmark03 the 5950U tends to beat the R9700P. I'd expect the 6600 vanilla to be within 5-10% of the 5950U. I havent used the R9700P myself but I know that it generally does worse than the 5950U in 3Dmark03.

In 3Dmark05 I'd wager the 6600 would leave both the R9700P and the 5950U for dust, due to vastly improved shader performance.

Its also short of a Pentium 4 by over 3000Mhz, but that doesnt change the fact that 300-425 is a decent OC. The reason I pointed out the OC performance is that the 6600 used the same GPU as the much higher (near double) clocked 6600GT. As such you'd expect a reasonable amount of headroom on that die design, whereas the GPU on the 9700Pro iirc is the fastest incarnation of that die, and therefore I would think ATi had pushed it as far as they were comfortable with. The vanilla 6600s (not GTs so much) are known to be good overclockers, at least on the GPU.

I agree it wouldnt be a 'significant' upgrade, and probably not worth the time imho, but it WOULD be an upgrade, whereas some people seemed to be saying the performance would be the same or worse.

I'd also agree with you in that 7600GS>6800GS, but last I checked the 7800GS was the only 7 series AGP card availible, I must say though that I dont really keep up to date on AGP cards anymore

It's not bad for DX8.1, it's terrible for DX9 anything. 3Dmark never reflected true PS2.0 performance, the first games showed that and Oblivion just drives that home nowadays. All FXs are crap at modern games, they are solid at DX8.1 like I mention but even nV abandoned them once they had the GF6 to sell which is a great series, but the plain GF600 is a weak member of that series.

Not easy to find R9700P review nowadays, but I doubt there would be enough difference to help in more than 1 of the resolution/aa combos here;

http://www.ixbt.com/video2/agp-2k6-d.shtml#p30

(and older review pits the R9800non-pro [which is same clocks are R9700P] against the GF6600);

http://www.digit-life.com/articles [...] -1024.html

Once again it's a fair distance from the GT and R3xx series in these Xbit benchies and the GF5950U 8O blown away, pummeled by an R9500Pro, which is on the heels of the GF6600;

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/v [...] u2_40.html

I'm not arguing that fact, nice OC and thus much better than stock, but the GT is the card that trades blows with the R9700P/9800series so you need to get into that ballpark to have the parity you're talking about, and like I said all the OCing in the world won't help that memory. The difference between the R300 and R350 aren't enough to be earth shattering (unlike the FX5600UR1 vs R2. The point simply being, talking only stock, Cleeve's bang on, talking overclocked then it's more interesting, but I still don't see miracles coming out of that poor memory even if it's the DDRII version and not the plain DDR, and a core that still has some trouble reaching full GT speed on the core.

Actually the GS is available, and the GF7600GT is supposed to arrive on AGP sometime this month, but I doubt it'll be cheap at first.

LOL, had I know you were going to post I would have put "even the lame 9600 pro beats the FX5950 where it counts"

Personally, if you have what it takes, I've seen a properly handled 6600 make nearly 600mhz core.....wasnt easy, but it shines quite well @ those speeds.
Yeah, memory is very limited though 8O


I honestly dont think its worth the $$ or time to upgrade to that paticular GPU imho. I'd aim higher....


If somebody can get an AGP 6600 I have a 9700pro around I can throw some numbers out, just to get a decent idea what it still performs at.
Now I need somebody who has a 5950 (or a 5900 flashed to 5950)
or a 6600.

Listen to Cleeve above all; the 9700pro you have will work fine; the 6600 really isn't much of an upgrade. In my opinion, the ability to use all forms of HDR may be great, but with the power that card has, you really won't be able to enjoy it much. Pretty much, the money on the 6600 would be wasted.

I normally don't say things like this, but here I am:

ROFLOL!

At any rate, Cleeve's easily one the most knowledgable people on the Internet when it comes to graphics cards. His expertise EASILY suprasses yours.

I really like how you say the 6600 "has more pipelines" than the 9700pro. In fact, it actually has LESS; the NV43 upon which the GF 6600 is based has eight pixel pipelines, each with one TMU, PSU, and ROP. A similar arrangement of eight pipelines is in the R300 used in the Radeon 9700pro.

However, the Radeon actually has one more geometry pipeline, having four to NV43's 3. Also, it boasts superior clock speeds and memory rates; the core runs at 325MHz to the GF 6600's 300MHz, and the memory clock speeds are 620MHz for the 9700pro, and 550MHz for the 6600. Once you toss on the fact that the Radeon has a 256-bit memory interface, while the 6600 makes do with a measly 128-bit interface... Newer technology be damned, the Radeon 9700pro is superior. It's not as powerful as the GeForce 6600 GT, but definitely surpasses the plain 6600.

Keep in mind that a benchmark of a 6600 against a 5950U is not something that can be used to draw a conclusion about how a 9700pro might perform against a 6600.

The big flaw here is that nVidia's GeForce FX cards used their old pipeline structure, where the FX 5950 ultra is a 4-pipeline card, with one ROP, one PSU, but two TMUs per pipe, as nVidia felt that TMU performance (as well as memory bandwidth) were the cheif constraints. As a result, in modern games, they ALWAYS get their rear ends handed to them by cards with more shader units.

However, you do make a valid point on the overclocking issue; ostensibly, since the 6600 is a whopping 200MHz short of the next-highest-step for the NV43, it's likely got a good overclocking ceiling compared to the Radeon 9700pro, which is at the top of its ladder for R300.

However, it's still worth noting that RAM is pretty much impossible to apply a large overclock on for ANY video card, and having DDR2 instead of GDDR3, the 6600's RAM will NEVER reach 6600GT speeds. And the 6600 is largely strangled by its fairly low memory bandwidth.

If you want to upgrade, really, I think that an ATi one might be the only one that fits; the 7600GS might make a thought or two, but it won't be, in my opinion, enough of a boost to be worth the while; it only compares to perhaps a 6800GS or X800GTO.

And the X800XT seriously spanks the X800GTO. A few spec facts:

X800XT:[*:e2509e6c86]R420 core; a 130nm part, but mildly overclockable.
[*:e2509e6c86]Has 16 "pixel pipelines" and runs at 500MHz; fill-rates are high, at 8 Gpixels/sec.
[*:e2509e6c86]256-bit memory @1000MHz (effective DDR) - 32GB/sec of bandwidth.X800GTO:[*:e2509e6c86]R430 core; a 110nm part, consumes less power, but is close to impossible to overclock. However, in some cases, it may be possible to flash to an X800XL, increasing pipeline count to 16. (see below)
[*:e2509e6c86]Has 12 "pixel pipelines" and runs at 400MHz; fill-rates are moderate, at 4.8 Gpixels/sec.
[*:e2509e6c86]256-bit memory @1000MHz (effective DDR) - 32GB/sec of bandwidth, same as X800XT.GeForce 7600GS:[*:e2509e6c86]G73 core; a 90nm part, fairly overclockable.
[*:e2509e6c86]Has 12 pipelines, and runs at 400MHz; fill-rates similar to X800GTO, though the core is slightly superior due to more advanced (efficient) technology.
[*:e2509e6c86]128-bit memory @1000MHz (effective DDR) - 16GB/sec of bandwidth: main strangulation factor against the Radeon competitors. It won't touch the X800XT, and roughly compares to the X800GTO.

the AIW X800XT is identical in performance to a plain Radeon X800XT; it's just the X1900 where we see that debacle; note that they DON'T label it as an AIW X1900XTX, indicating it's in its own performance raking, seperate of the rest of the X1900 group.

The 7800GS, in most cases, is the performance leader for AGP. However, at its price, it simply makes no sense; it's pretty much smarter to get a whole new system, as a PCI-express card at less than half the cost (say, the 7600GT) will beat it handily.

Please note that 3Dmark03 benchmarks pretty much have no bearing on modern gaming; the thing does technically use pixel shaders, but hardly ever; it's almost entirely texturing performance that it measures, which is the only real strong point of the FX 5950ultra. You switch to 3Dmark05, which is moderately shader-intensive, and the 9700pro slams the FX5950 ultra, while the 6600 does, I believe, pull a slight lead over the 9700pro.

I'm not Cleeve, but I will give an answer similar to what he will: you'll have to overclock very carefuly. Most likely, you won't be able to achieve results close to what you might with an improved cooler. Most of all, you'll hardly be able to touch the RAM speeds without major problems; it's both DDR2, (compared to the vastly faster GDDR3 in the 6600GT) as well as not being covered by the cooler.

However, you likely will be able to push your core a bit. Possibly a significant bit; you can only find out how far it'll go if you try. Just remember to be careful, work incrementally, testing it EACH TIME you raise it a MHz or so, and if you see glitches, IMMEDIATELY go back to the last speed.

Generally, I'd shoot for a card that can comkfortably run HDR at a resolution that one prefers, without sacrificing other settings and the like that one is used to. Generally, I kinda draw the line where you start to meet 256-bit cards, and some of the current-gen mid-range, which are 128-bit. Perhaps at the 6800 and 7600 for Geforce, and likewise, X800s (for SM 2.0 HDR) and lesser X1800s for the Radeons; you MIGHT try HDR with the X1600s, but often it'll mean going for a lower resolution than you're used to.