Death of a Radeon
Marik_Steele
To rule in hell... Join Date: 2002-11-20 Member: 9466Members
To rule in hell... Join Date: 2002-11-20 Member: 9466Members
in Off-Topic
I'm the proud owner of an ATi Radeon 9800 Pro. Bought it for KOTOR 1. Been traveling with it a lot. Airport security personnel in certain cities haven't been too happy about this. They haven't treated it well. So after 1 1/2 to 2 years of enjoyable use, then about 6 months of frustrating texture corruption...it's finally died.
May it rest in peace, for its mail-in rebate made it affordable at the time, and it has served me well since.
I am forced to return to a previous video card of mine. Not the GeForce 2, no, that one is in a different city.
I mean my 3DFx Voodoo 4.
<a href="http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php?card1=31&card2=12" target="_blank">This comparison may help those unfamiliar with 3Dfx</a>
I've been in a good mood all day. I'd love to keep up that optimism, so I'll say it's a grand time to try out the Glide games I missed out on, like Tomb Raider 1.
If you have a suggestion of a competitively-priced store or product I should see for a replacement, upgrade, or system-wide purchase within the next 6 months...by all means, I'm open to hearing it.
May it rest in peace, for its mail-in rebate made it affordable at the time, and it has served me well since.
I am forced to return to a previous video card of mine. Not the GeForce 2, no, that one is in a different city.
I mean my 3DFx Voodoo 4.
<a href="http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php?card1=31&card2=12" target="_blank">This comparison may help those unfamiliar with 3Dfx</a>
I've been in a good mood all day. I'd love to keep up that optimism, so I'll say it's a grand time to try out the Glide games I missed out on, like Tomb Raider 1.
If you have a suggestion of a competitively-priced store or product I should see for a replacement, upgrade, or system-wide purchase within the next 6 months...by all means, I'm open to hearing it.
Comments
I also have a Radeon 9800 Pro (Sapphire) and it is a superb little card.
I paid £90 for mine almost 2 years ago and it's performed well against Half-Life 2, FarCry, Doom3 and countless others.
I'm pretty sure i've seen these cards going on eBay for around £40.
The problem with being items of this nature off eBay is the idiotic postage prices people charge.
How much have you got to spend? I'm currently looking at investing in 3DConnect's Radeon X800 GTO for ~£90. Sadly I also need to replace my motherboard for one with PCI-Express slots :S
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Agreed, postage is insane. It's yet another reason I've been thinking about the above-quoted question quite a bit lately.
For me, must be AGP. Upgrading to PCI-express would require a new motherboard. A new motherboard would require new ram and processor. And all of the above would encourage getting a suitable power supply & upgrading from IDE to SATA hard drives...and by that point I might as well buy new computer. That's not something I can afford until Jan 1 2007 at the earliest.
Right now I'm debating between several options I see:
<ul><li>Radeon X1300 Pro (AGP, 256meg DDR2, made by ATI instead of 3rd party company) $70.</li><li>GeForce 6600STD by PNY, $50. (Based on stats like 256megs of ram and said ram's speed, appears to be 6600LE)</li><li>Wait until Sunday and hope the next round of newspaper ads pushed out by retail stores will have better deals.</li></ul>
<a href="http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/overclocking/vidcard/127/2" target="_blank">http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/overcl...g/vidcard/127/2</a>
saved me a few squid
It's AGP, and every game I throw at it runs great, especially Quake 4, I can run it on Ultra 1280x1024 with quite playabel framerates.
I don't know what your budget is, but if you're willing to spend from $120-$150, a 6800XT. Newegg has a sale on said card for the weekend, I don't know if you only want a card that you can buy at a retail location, but here's the link to the afore mentioned card.
<a href="http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814150157" target="_blank">http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16814150157</a>
I have a Connect 3D Radeon X800 GTO, you can flash the card so easily (thanks to frost ! <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/tounge.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":p" border="0" alt="tounge.gif" />) its a joke
<a href="http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/overclocking/vidcard/127/2" target="_blank">http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/overcl...g/vidcard/127/2</a>
saved me a few squid
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I was *this close* <squints eyes and makes tiny space between thumb and forefinger> to flashing my 9800 Pro into a 9800 XT. Then I did a little more research on my particular model of 9800 pro and found out the performance increase wouldn't be worth the shortened lifespan.
I've also read a recent (methinks even <1 week old) article testing the difference between an Audigy 2 ZS flashed into an Audigy 4 vs. an actual Audigy 4--the conclusion was that you'd get absolutely equal audio quality, but games would be more likely to see & take advantage of the features on the Audigy 2 ZS if it *wasn't* flashed.
If my next video card is flash-upgradeable to something better, I'm going to be reading a heck of a lot of sources before trying it.
Although, bang for buck, in the low price range (looking at ~£70), is taken by the x800gto's (not gt, or the GTO 128mb models), even with them not being able to be flashed anymore (If your lucky you'll get old stock, which can be), they are still high performance cards. With an out of the box r480, 1.6ns gto performing close with a 6800gt.
If you can wait a bit, ati should have the x1300xt and x1650pro released fully, which, i'd hope, would mean a drop in price of x1300pro's (which is noticably slower than a 9800pro) and x1600pro/xt's, both of who's agp and pci-e variants perform almost equally.
<a href="http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/index.cfm?a=wiki&tag=rmp_vds" target="_blank">Numbers 30 through 50 should be found reasonably priced.</a>
[...]If you can wait a bit[...]
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...and that's a key phrase I've had running through my head the past several days. I can buy anything from just a replacement card to an entire new computer. The longer I wait the more money I'll have and the cheaper stuff will get.
We'll just see whether I'm paitent enough to wait for Jan 1 2007, the day I was *planning* to buy or build my next "this ought to last about 2-3 years" dream machine.
Thanks for that video card list in order by performance, DarkFrost. I'd seen it before and have been googling around for the past several days trying to find it again.
That UK price listed at the bottom of the summary is insane.
I also have a Radeon 9800 Pro (Sapphire) and it is a superb little card.
I paid £90 for mine almost 2 years ago and it's performed well against Half-Life 2, FarCry, Doom3 and countless others.
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Same, but I paid £150. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/sad-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":(" border="0" alt="sad-fix.gif" /> 3 Years ago. Excellent card. I was looking at the <a href="http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=6037" target="_blank">Radeon X1600</a>, it's cheap and it may be as reliable as the 9800Pro! (can only hope)
<a href="http://www.pyramid.com/Product.aspx?StockCode=D51828&ref_Source=Shopping&ref_StockCode=D51828&ref_Type=CPC" target="_blank">Just over £100</a> and <a href="http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php?card1=31&card2=329" target="_blank">a bit better than the 9800PRO.</a> Not sure if you have a PCI-E Motherboard, but you can always go for the AGP card.
I only used them in my previous post in reference to the posted card choices.
Lately I've been noticing more and more sales and deals for the fastest AGP cards on the market. $125. $150. A good friend of mine was in a store with me when he bought a high-end AGP card for >$300 about a year ago--it's down to $250 now.
But more importantly, I'm noticing that more powerful PCI-E cards are <i>cheaper</i> than those agp "great deals."
So despite what I said in an above post about "must be agp," I've decided not to upgrade at all. My next purchase will be for a full machine overhaul.
I'll get a taste of such next-gen power in about a week, when a friend of mine will receive & show off a new $4800 purchase he made. (How & why he managed to order a $4800 computer is beyond me--the guy's been playing *nothing* but Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory for the past 4 years.)
P.S. Re-purchasing Starcraft + Brood Wars has been a worthwhile $8 spent.
The best bang for your buck atm is an x800 xt platinum edition. it's a great AGP card, and will not set you back much. if you plan on joining the pci-ex club though, id suggest the x1800 xt.
As for why agp cards are cheaper than pci-ex? Quite simply, agp is no longer the norm and is now more of a fringe item. pci-ex has been out the better part of 2 and a half years. company's stopped mass producing agp about a year before that, too. in all honesty, consider upgrading your mobo and processor. you can pick up a better than your AGP card and a new mobo and cpu for the price of a high end agp card.
I really do miss 3dfx. If you arn't ready to go to PCIE, save for it when newer systems come out and just get a new or used comparable card cheap. after intel releases the conroe AMD has pricecuts coming, would be a good time for upgrading everything
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I haven't been following intel/amd developments closely for some time--with so much dual/quad core news, I'm getting the feeling I should.