Which one?

[Cody_7]

Hey,

I'm new here, but i've come here alot and read your Graphics Cards buyer's guide a few times.

I just upgraded from my Nvidia GeForce 2 (32mb) and bought a Sahpire ATi Radeon 9600 Pro (128mb)a few weeks ago. In the buyer's guide, the best mid-range card was this 9600 Pro. Well, i'm not that happy about the card, i am still only getting 30-45 FPS in some of my games like Black Hawk Down, and America's Army. I expected to get a much better frame rate than this.

So now i'm thinking of getting a Radeon 9800 insted. I know these cards are usually expensive, but at newegg.com, i found some for about $150 in my price range. Most of them are SE's which i heard to avoid. I heard the the 9800 Non-pro are good cards, too. But i did find one SE card that had over 60 user reviews and all gave 5 stars - every one of em! and they said that you can soft mod it to a PRO version. Here's the link:

<A HREF="http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=14-131-236&depa=0" target="_new">http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=14-131-236&depa=0</A>

Is this card worth buying? I did find some 9800 Pros for under $200 dollars but since they have no reviews, i'm worried.

I'm so confused because after doing so much research and getting this 9600 Pro, its not doing nearly as nicely as it should. I dont know where to go. Can you guys help?

Thanks, Cody-7

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Cody_7 on 06/11/04 07:00 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[scottchen]

It's very very likely that you didn't remove the Nvidia drivers when you installed the ATI card, therefore performance will be very bad. The R9800 are nice make sure they have 256bit memory bandwidth, it's a bios flash to softmod, but most 9800np can't make it to pro's speeds.

<A HREF="http://forums.extremeoverclocking.com/myrig.php?do=view&id=17301" target="_new">My PC</A>

 

[Cody_7]

Well, i know you are supposed to take out the old drivers and here's what i did:

I went to Display Properties and hit advanced, then i clicked adapter and clicked properties. Then i clicked on the driver tab and then clicked uninstall whic i supposed removed the driver. I installed my Radeon then booted up my computer. Windows then siad it was on low settings because i had no drivers, (it was on 640x480 res) but i installed the Catalyst drivers (latest version) and rebooted my coomputer, at it seems like my drivers are installed. Did i do it the right way?

 

[phial]

dude i used to play Black Hawk Down with my Radeon 8500 and my TI4200, with good frame rates



theres something else wrong

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[Cody_7]

Well Phial,

I do get good frame rates but one of the biggest things is the map. With custom maps people always find a way to make it laggy, etc.

On the standard maps that came with the game i got around 45-50 FPS.

 

[Crashman]

Most 9800SE cards are weaker than the 9600 Pro. A few are roughly equal to the 9600 Pro. If you're looking for an upgrade, the 9500 non-pro version 2.0 (aka 9800SE) isn't a good choice.

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[phial]

well the thing is, drivers sometimes leave remnants of themselves in the registry and whatnot.



i forget hte exact name of the best nvidia driver cleaner, but <A HREF="http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=167" target="_new">but heres a decent one that i know of </A>.


1-uninstall driver
2-boot into safe mode
3-run cleaner
4-reboot and install new driver

-------
<A HREF="http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/you.html" target="_new">please dont click here! </A>
<A HREF="http://www.subhi.com/keyboard.jpg" target="_new">This is you, interweb junky</A>

 

[splenda20]

I'm surprised no one else picked up on this, but you didn't completely remove your old drivers. You need something like <A HREF="http://www.chill-tek.com/downloads/nvidia-drivers.html" target="_new">detonator destroyer</A> to get rid of your old drivers. (I haven't ever downloaded from this site, so maybe someone can recommend a better site to download from)

Or, you might wanna consider reformatting your HDD for max performance

Also, if you think your benchmark scores are still too low, let us know what the rest of your system specs are so we can tell you if there is something else that is bottlenecking (I think that's a word!) your PC


Guessed I typed too slowly, looks like Phial beat me to it.
<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by splenda20 on 06/11/04 11:12 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[Cody_7]

ok. i'll try removing my drivers and see if that helps (it would of been nice if they gave instructions with my card).

I know good video cards will do better on fast PC's and my PC probably isn' the best. Anyhow, heres my specs.

Dell Dimension 4300
Pentium 4 1.6GHz
512 MB RAM
Win XP Home
Sorry, i don't know what motherboard i have.

Thanks, Cody-7

***Oh, just to let you know, i just tried to dowload NVcleaner, but i got a page cannot be displayed, so i'll try the one splenda gave me***
<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Cody_7 on 06/12/04 02:58 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[Cody_7]

By the way, to Splenda, i would tottally re-format my hard drive cuase i do have a bunch of things goin on in windows - anyhow, i would TOTTALY re-format and re-install windows if i didn't give a kid my Windows XP CD 2 years ago in 7th grade (i know i'm kicking myself for this)

 

[phial]

hmm a P4 1.6? they arent known to be great for games, and 1.6 is kinda low honestly. this is whats holding you back mostly, and you would be better off upgrading your CPU/MOBO before anything else


and do you have SD or DDR ram? P4's need DDR to be any good at gaming.


:>

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[entium]

guru 3d has mirrors for it me thinks

 

[entium]

yeah thats true, really might want to get a processor upgrade soon. If ya have DDR ram already (think most likely you have SD ram) might want to pop a couple hundred for a p 2.5 and some ram. or got to AMD xp 3200+

 

[phial]

SD ram on a P4.



yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck



i am sitting at a P4 1.7 with SD ram. im downloading SISOFT Sandra benchmark program to test it, and to compare it to my home system.... ill tell you guys in a sec how good it performs

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[phial]

[-peep-] nevermind, im not logged in as admin and i cant install anything

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[MrPanther0]

Abit Nf7 Mobo - 80$
Mobile Athlon 2500- 85
165$ up grade, same as you would pay for a new 9800. You can overclock the [-peep-] out of that.

 

[phial]

yep.

he will get more performance out of a new CPU/MOBO with that 9600pro, compared to a 9800pro with his current setup

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[Cody_7]

Yeah, i believe i do have SD Ram =(

I managed to download NVCleaner, and it had a list of drivers and such but when i clicked clean, ti said that every one of those drivers did not exist (they were no longer on my computer) so my drivers musn't be the problem.
By the way, i overclocked to 452/329, but i saw <b>very</b> little difference in performance, so it must be my computer.

On my birthday (in august) my mom said i can get a new computer - YAY!!! but i got a question about that - If i got an AMD 64bit, 2.2 GHz would it be as powerful as a Pentium at 3.0 Ghz cause that seems alot more powerful...

-Cody 7

 

[cefoskey]

Actually its nothing more than omega drivers to mod a 9800SE>98000PRO.

UNFORTUNATELY, the mod is simply unlocking 4 of the 8 total pipes which were diabled for a reason. You are likely to end up enabling bad pipes and getting bad artifact issues.

Im running a 9600PRO and Im getting much better framerates than this this guy. An OS reinstall is BADLY needed.

"Who is General Failure, and why is he reading my drive?"
P4 3.0 HT, Intel D865GBF, 512MB Crucial PC3200 DDR, WD 36GB Raptor 10,000RPM, BBA Radeon 9600PRO, SB Audigy, Hauppage WinTV

 

[MrPanther0]

In august you should be able to afford a 2.4 A64. Depending on which core is used, it will beat a P4 in the 3.0 ~3.6GHZ range.

 

[Cody_7]

ok, i've got a couple of questions for you, cefoskey:

The first one is, what are artifacts, anyways? i know you can get them if you overclock too much, and you say you can get them from opening those other pipelines.

The other is, yes i do need to re-install windows. You wouldnt believe waht problems i have, and my antivirus programs dont find any viruses. Here's the list:

Windows takes like 7 minutes to start because it just sits there with my background before the start bar shows up.

My original hard drive (20 Gb) is a <b>mess</b> !!! you wouldnt believe it defragmenting doesnt even help!

Every time i open a window (e.g. My computer, folders, etc) windows just restarts. I have to do everything using the My Computer toolbar on my start bar.

And to top it off, i dont have my windows CD anymore. If i took it to a computer shop, would they re-install windows for me? can a get another copy if i give them my windows serial number? (probobly not)

Thanks, Cody-7

 

[splenda20]

WOW!!! Stop downloading crap and looking at porn and you won't have so many problems!!!

Anyways, if you have a XP CD Key but no disk, you should just borrow a CD from a friend and install Windows again.

And stop looking at porn that messes with your computer. Stick to the legit and clean (computer wise) porn

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by splenda20 on 06/13/04 01:54 AM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[Cody_7]

LOL he he i don't look at much porn (uhhh...) but never would i download it

But, only one CD-key works for each Windows CD, right? (just like games) so i assume my key wouldnt work for any other CD. But i might have someone down the street who i can barrow XP from...

But anyways, my other question, What are artifacts anyways?

-Cody 7

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Cody_7 on 06/12/04 10:26 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[georgebeee]

if you absolutely cannot find a cd of windows xp, even if you can, there is a program named "advanced uninstaller pro 2003 version 6" which is a killer unit. it finds all your invalid shortcuts, cleans and optimizes your registry for you, etc. you can download it and use it for free for 30 days. that should help you with your slow start-up time and all that jazz.

http://download.com.com/3000-2096-10286025.html?tag=lst-0-3

but...I got a BBA 9600xt, and when I uninstalled my nvidia drivers from my previous card I thought they had been completely removed. heh, heh. I don't think they did this by accident if you ask me. but when I went and re-installed windows xp on the advice of THG forum members' advice I got a noticable improvement in the performance of my card.

 

[cefoskey]

Artifacts end up being areas on the screen where youll get lines, strange colour pixels, blocks, and pretty much just crap all over the place. They result from errors the card produces when running damaged pipes, clocking too fast, or overheating. I pretty much melted my original Radeon LE overclocking it back in the day, right before I did the artifacts were so bad I couldnt run any 3d apps.

To answer your other question, windows CD-keys are not proprietary to any paticualr windows disk. If you still have your CD key then you can use anyone's disk, install the software, and activate it using your CD key. After that, 99% of your problems will be solved.

"Who is General Failure, and why is he reading my drive?"
P4 3.0 HT, Intel D865GBF, 512MB Crucial PC3200 DDR, WD 36GB Raptor 10,000RPM, BBA Radeon 9600PRO, SB Audigy, Hauppage WinTV