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Puter help

Wascal

Captive of the Dark Side
Joined
Jun 13, 2002
Messages
1,586
2 questions today. First my system:

Dell 2.53 ghz, w/533mhz,mmt, prm snd.
Memory is 512 pc2700

1. Can pc 3200 memory work in this system? Found a great price on 512 pc 3200 non ecc DDR sticks.

2. Looking at replacing my video card. What's the opinion on a Geforce FX 5200 256 ddr board? My local Sam's Club has this for $96.00.

Thanks in advance.

Mike
 
You can use pc3200 with your system, it will only run at 2700 of course. I wouldn't suggest mixing the pc2700 with the 3200 though.

That graphics card is fine as long as you don't plan on doing any serious 3D gaming. Really, you could go with just about anything if thats the case.
 
Went back and edited the graphics card specs, it is a 256 DDR card. Currently running a 64 meg board. Not much of a puter tech but do know to use the memory in matched pairs. :thumbs:

Card here
 
Do you do any 3D gaming: Far Cry, Doom 3, Painkiller... If you don't then you won't notice a difference between your current card and the 5200. The 2D might even be better on your current card if its an ATI.
 
memory speeds a little slow compared to the newer cards out there, but like other said, if you don't do cutting edge gaming.....
You'll definitely see an improvement with 256 MB graphic memory vs. 64, and the jump to 512 in system memory will also speed things up.

Running XP Home?
 
The PC3200 will work just fine.

The amount of memory on the video card isn't as important as the speed of the memory and the number of pipelines between it and the chipset. A lot of card makers are tricking customers by dumping huge amounts of wasted memory onto slow chipsets.

The only thing in games the extra memory will give you is quicker load times between levels when it loads the textures.

Radeon 9800 Pro cards are down to the $150 range with 128 MB of RAM. I believe this is currently the "sweet spot" on the market before diminishing returns are rampant.

Tom's hardware did their VGA roundup just last month. I think the charts below show what a steal the 9800 Pro is considering the cards above it are much more expensive.

chart2.jpg


Turn on 4X AA to get some real Eye Candy and the high end cards start showing their balls, the 9800 Pro stays competitive though.

chart3.jpg


See the full review here.

-Matt-

PS Sam's Price is around $25 higher than the going mail order price on a 256 MB GeForce 5200 card. You can get a lot more card for $100 elsewhere. NewEgg.com is a great place to buy PC Upgrades.
 
It's also a good card especially for gaming. Also Wascal, good choice in your online retailer, Newegg.com is a superb site and service. Also you can trust the reader comments on that board as well as they are some very intelligent hardware enthusiast and seing as how this card got mostly 5 stars from everyone there it's good.
 
Wascal, I have the Chaintech GeForce FX5700 Ultra Apogee and it can be overclocked to increase memory speeds to around 475 and GPU speeds of a little over 1000. I have mine running at those speeds, it's stable and outperforms the Radion cards in its class. THose benchmarks TX posted are good to compare with as well.

At around $250, it's a great Nvidia card if you're thinking about going that route!

Lee
 
I second Newegg, I buy all my hardware from them, low prices, great customer service, and fast shipping.

You still haven't said if you are a gamer or not. If you are not, IMPO its just a waste of money. If you are, its a pretty good card, but I prefer the ATI 9800pro over it though... I have a 9800 and am looking to upgrade to the new Nvidia 6800 card some time in the near future.
 
Mike,

NewEgg carries 128 MB 9800 Pro cards for $155(128 bit mem, 8 pipes) and $185(256 bit mem, 8 pipes). Once either of these comes into stock I feel either would be a better choice for slightly less/slightly more money. Many of the reviewers are reporting that the MSI card ($185 one) has the R360 core, so you get a 9800 XT for the price of a 9800 Pro. There are great utilities available for Radeon cards to automatically apply the fastest usable overclock without artifacts or stability problems.

I used to be a die hard nVidia GeForce chipset fan. My 4 previous video cards have all had nVidia chipsets. Right now ATI has the better product for the money. They have also adopted a unified driver like nVidia. I used to hate ATI for offering poor legacy driver support, but this is no longer the case.

Oh something very important to check. How big is your power supply? (in Watts) These new video cards need extra juice! In both the case of that 5900XT and Radeon 9800 they need to be supplied power via a Molex connector (splitter is included if your PSU has the juice). My 9800Pro recommends at least 300 Watt PSU in the manual, I expect the nVidia card will require at least 300 Watts as well.

-Matt-
 
Can't top Matt's knowledge experience in the video field, but I do recall that many of the PC magazines in the past have had only good things to say about Chaintech products. I happen to an ATI fan, so I'm biased, but that looks like a decent card with good memory speed. :D
 
Sorry for not answering the gaming question. Everquest II in due out in 6 days. They recomend 1 gig of mem and at least a 128 card. Thanks for reminding me about the power supply, something else I'm going to have to replace. :(
 
Matt, that's interesting about the 9800pro being better bang for the buck.

My question is would that card perform better than my nvidia geforce 5700 ultra, which is overclocked to the max and stable?

Thanks

Lee
 
Heya Lee,

I guess it depends somewhat on the kind of overclock you are getting. Also, if you don't use AA/AF in games the 5700U will keep up very well. Once you enable these options for image quality the 9800 really pulls ahead.

The 5700U has 4 memory pipelines and 128 bit bus width vs. the 9800 Pro's 8 memory pipelines and 256 bit bus width; so even though the 5700U has faster clock speeds on both the core and memory the 9800 pro can pump a lot more data through. In nVidia you have to get a 5900XT or higher to get the 8 pipes and 256 bit architecture. The 5900XT is about the same price as the 9800 pro right now, but is slower in most game benchmarks. Somehow it is slightly faster in 3DMark which makes me suspect optimization trickery.

I also really like the utility "ATITool" I use on my Radeon. My card runs at the stock 378 core and 338(676) memory until I start a DirectX/OpenGL app. Once the utility senses that one of those APIs is being utilized it switches the card to the overclock settings. It also automatically determines the fastest overclock the card can handle with no artifacts. With a GPU cooler upgrade and BGA RAMsinks installed my card will do 438/370(740), but I turned that down to 435/365(730) just to be safe. I have the R350 core on my card; so if the MSI cards are coming with the 360 core they can run considerably faster.
 
Ok I didn't read every post, but here are some thoughts:

You don't need a graphics card with 256mb memory that runs at such a low speed (the 5200), and can't use the newest gimmicks in games (because that's where you need the huge memory).

I'd say the 9800 Pro is a good buy. I have a 9800 SE (with faster memory and 8 pipes) running at 9800 Pro speed. It runs, for example, Far Cry well, which is a new game with very nice graphics. Toms Hardware made a chart (VGA Chart III or something) that showed which cards had the best bang for buck. Look it up if you're interested.
 
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