Recently me and a friend of mine decided to buy the radeon 9800 series cards. I bought the ASUS 9800xt and he bought the ASUS 9800 pro both 256 MB cards. I must say we both agree that neither one of these cards perform as mentioned in their reviews on Tomshardware. In fact I might say the perform the oposite of what he came up with. There are alot of severe issues with these cards and their drivers. Consumers' BEWARE!! Let me start by explaining the problems I have had with the 9800xt.
My Specs:
MotherBoard: ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe no OverClocking
Processor: AMD 3200+ no OverClocking
Memory: Geil DDR400(PC3200) no OverClocking
HD: Seagate Barracuda 7200 serial ata raid
GC: ASUS 9800 XT 256
My Friend's:
MotherBoard: ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe no OverClocking
Processor: AMD 2800+ no OverClocking
Memory: Corsair DDR400(PC3200) no OverClocking
HD: WD Raptor Drives serial ata raid
GC: ASUS 9800 Pro 256
Both of these systems were built recently so their were no old drivers laying around on the Filesystem.
The first thing that came across so obvious is that SmartDoctor is crap. This program is a joke; it is littered with all sorts of bugs. The program crashes constantly even when you try to overclock slightly. SmartDoctor has a difficult time processing mouse events. It looks as if the programmer knew nothing of multithreaded applications. You try to drag and drop it around and it will only move a little at a time then stop. You have to click on it a million times to drag it across the desktop. My friend has the exact same problem using the program. None of the new releases fix anything. The program doesnt seem to help any on performance. In fact when I have it up and running with games it will cause things to freeze and lockup. I finally ended up removing it all together. I tried using ATITool and I had no problems at all overclocking and testing. I advise not running this software.
I guess now I should mention the benchmark results. We ran both 3DMark03 and AquaMark3. Granted Tom's didnt test with 3dmark, but he scored a 47,620 with AquaMark3 (http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/20030930/radeon_9800-20.html)!! Neither one of us can even get half that using AquaMark's scoring system. I think both of us scored somewhere in the higher 20 thousands! I tried everything from tweeking the drivers to overclocking and the 9800xt still couldnt touch that score. What gives?? We also couldnt touch any of the scores listed on
http://www.driverheaven.net/reviews/xt59/index3.htm or
http://www.motherboards.org/articlesd/hardware-reviews/1273_1.html with AquaMark3 and 3Dmark03. We matched the benchmark settings exactly and nothing seemed to help. Both cards also experienced artifacting. Especially in the pixel shading tests.
None of the games we run seem to like these cards either. Textures would come out degraded and crappy looking in BattleField Vietnam. Homeworld2 ran with alot of lag using this card and sometimes VPU, on the 9800xt, would kickin and restart, oh and thats a whole new issue on its own. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004 ran slower FPS than listed on Toms Review and VPU would kickin. It seemed to stay around 38 FPS for 1024x768 32 Bit 60 Hz. He reached 48.6? I also could spot artifacting in the trees when looking down from the plane. We ran several other games and none of the Benchmarks seemed to matchup even close. This card seems to artifact bad in general. I assure you we tried to match to test settings as close as possible.
Dont let me forget this handy dandy VPU recovery system. This is rediculous. If there is something wrong with your graphics card just fix it, update the drivers, reboot into VGA mode, or RMA. This card will VPU just sitting at the desktop let alone while your playing a game. Its a convenient feature if ya need a reboot. If your lucky sometimes it will just lockup.
The SMART cooling system doesnt help at all. Let me tell you, the 9800xt runs flat out HOT no matter what. I had to take cover off my case it heated up the system soo bad. it runs 57-60 C regularly. I took the card out and replaced it with my old Graphics card and the whole system cools down by nearly 8 degrees. This is unacceptable.
Sorry guys, I need to vent. I have been so disappointed with this purchase. It doesnt perform at all like any of the reviews I have read. I dont know maybe its just the card I got, but Im reading similar on all the game forums, newegg.com, http://www.techsupportforum.com/computer/topic/11448-1.html, http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/17194/, http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?s=0bb20d0aaeb6cc0b803f33496b419bda&threadid=282960&highlight=9800xt,
http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?s=0bb20d0aaeb6cc0b803f33496b419bda&threadid=276941&highlight=9800xt+problems,
http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?s=0bb20d0aaeb6cc0b803f33496b419bda&threadid=275206&highlight=9800xt+problems,
http://www.abxzone.com/forums/showthread/t-61933.html,
http://www.motherboards.org/articlesd/hardware-reviews/1273_1.html(mentions driver issues), and more. I tried old and the new drivers from ASUS and ATI. We also tried the Omega drivers. None of them seemed to help.
I finally RMAed my card; I really hope something good comes back from ASUS. I spent $460 on this card a while back, I would hate to be stuck with something bad.
Im also wondering if the nforce chipset could be influencing these scores in any way. Maybe the motherboard is interfering somehow??? If you guys can help in anyway, I would appreciate it. Feedback, experiences, opionions, fixes, and whatnot.. Thanks!