8500 hampered by CPU?

[Nong23]

Hey guys,I have:
Duron 1200
ECS K7S5A mainboard
256mb Crucial DDR (i plan to buy an extra 256 very soon)
2 X 40gb Seagate HDD
48X Sony CDrom
ATX 300watt Midi Case
I currently have a Gf2-mx400

I plan to buy an ATI Radeon 8500 retail soon (275/275). Will my comp/cpu be a problem for the radeon to perform? i only want to play games such as nba2001, Q3, Mohaa, Wolf and a few others in the future...Will the mx400 do the job or will the radeon's performance plummet as a result of my cpu? Tom usually uses very high end equipment when performing his benchmarks? Any comments?

Cheers

 

[Black_Cat]

I think the Duron 1200 will be fine for the Radeon 8500. Definitely better than the MX. Just make sure you get the 6058 drivers with it. Get them here:

<A HREF="http://www.maxreboot.com/" target="_new">http://www.maxreboot.com/</A>

I can't think of a good signature so I'll use this one.

 

[DDR64]

I disagree. That CPU is a little bit slow for 8500. Athlon's bigger L2 Cache size does make quite a difference in frame rate, bearing this in mind, and other CPU scaling test, I would think that Duron 1.2GHz may be barely fast enuf to pair it with 7500 but not 8500. I would go for 8500 if I have at least 1.4GHz Athlon.

But, that shouldn't stop you from getting 8500 if you have the money. Just upgrade to a faster CPU later.

 

[chuck232]

I've seen in CPU scaling tests that Radeons perform quite well on slower systems. A Duron 1.2GHz would be adequate for a R8500 and I'd say his system is at least good enough for a R7500 or maybe a 8500LE.

 

[rcf84]

hmmmmmm..... the Radeon 8500 can beat a GF4 Ti4600 on tests with slower cpu's. The radeon 8500 doesnt need alot of CPU power since it has a full T&L unit where the GF4 Ti4600 has to emulate it.

I invented ctrl-alt-del but Bill [Gates] made it famous - Dave Bradley IBM PC designer

 

[phsstpok]

The Radeon 8500 will be a lot faster. Better GPU and much higher video memory bandwidth than the MX-400 will make all the difference.

The only benchmarks I can point you to is Madonion.com. Use the online result browser. You'll see the best score for a Geforce2 MX/MX-400 paired with a Duron 1200 is around 4100 but a Radeon 8500 plus Duron 1200 scores 8100. Of course the best scores are always with overclocked video cards but the difference would be similar between stock clocked video cards. This shows how much better Radeon 8500 does with DirectX 8 than the MX-400. You'd see similar gains in OpenGL.

For an approximation of Duron performance take a look at the Sub-$200 video card review at the <A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com" target="_new">http://www.anandtech.com</A>. Look at the scaling results. These show how the video cards do using an Athlon XP clocked from 800mhz (yes, 800) to 1733mhz. Yes, a faster processor can mean better performance but most of the graphics performance comes from the video card. There isn't an MX400 to compare but you'll still see what I mean. Just look at the graphs.

Don't worry. The Radeon 8500 will be great.

Of course, you could wait for the Geforce Ti4200 which should cost about the same as the 8500.

<b>I have so many cookies I now have a FAT problem!</b>

 

[bdaley]

Just a word of caution. I went from the 6052 to 6058 drivers on my R8500 (with a clean uninstall of old drivers) and my 3DMark score went DOWN over 200 points. I then did a clean uninstall of the 6058 drivers and installed the latest 6043 official drivers and my score went back up to the original 6052 levels.

I don't know if this has happened to anyone else, but I have the same motherboard as you so you might want to watch out. I don't know if it's something with the SIS AGP drivers or what. Most people seem to like the 6058 drivers, though.

"There's no such thing as gravity, the Earth just sucks."

 

[AMD_Man]

I went down about 50pts on the 6058, but they're generally faster in games though.

<b><i>"A penny saved is a penny earned!"</i></b>

 

[Guest]

Your Duron will be fine with a Radeon 8500. I have a 1,3GHz Duron, o/c to 1,43GHz with the Radeon 8500, and get about 7800 in 3Dmark. I'm not even sure I´m using the best driver, better do some tests...

My system:

1430MHz Duron 1,7V (13x110)
ECS K7S6A Mobo
256MB PC2100 CAS2
Radeon 8500
300W PSU
Windows ME (4.90.3000)