Video Card Rec/Help

Hello all. Local shop is having a sale on a BFG Asylum FX 5200 256MB PCI vid card, and on a
FX 5700 LE 256 MB 8x AGP.

I would like to get one of these 2 cards. Naturally, I am upgrading to improve my SL performance, so I am wondering if anyone has any SL experience with either of these. Happy? Sad?

Thanks,
Max.

Max -

First off: Note that one of these cards is a PCI card. Is that PCI-Express, or normal PCI? PCI-Express has only been around for a couple of months; so unless your system is brand new, it won't work with a PCI-E card.

If your machine is 1 - 3 years old, it most likely has an AGP slot. AGP systems should perform better than "normal" PCI ones. Some "pre-built" computers from companies like Dell, Wal-Mart, etc. don't have AGP slots, though - so you'll want to check before making any purchases. I'm attaching a screenshot of a motherboard with both (normal) PCI and AGP slots.

So, now that we have hardware compatability out of the way, let's look at performance & price:

I covered many graphics cards in this thread recently:
/111/c8/33477/1.html

...And www.tomshardware.com has a great article here about AGP cards:
http://www20.graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20041004/index.html

NOTE that the FX 5700 you see on sale is an LE model! This means it is a stripped-down / crippled lower-performance model! So when you look at the benchmarks and performance numbers in the articles above, your "LE" card will perform worse than the "5700" they list.

Since SL uses OpenGL, I would put slightly more weight on the "Doom3" benchmark results than any other game listed in the articles above. DirectX performance is important though, so don't ignore the other Benchmarks.

Looking at the figures, I'd still go with my recommendation of a Raedeon 9800 Pro. It performs better than either the 5200 or the 5700 LE. On www.pricewatch.com I can find 5200's for around $50, and 5700's for $80 - $120, depending on if they're "LE" models or not (remember, "LE" = lower performance)... However, unless you're running on a GeForce2 or Raedeon 7xxx model, you're not going to see a whole lot of performance increase with these cards! I'd highly recommend you wait, save some more cash, and spring for the $150 Raedeon 9800 Pro. If you do, make sure you do not get an "SE" model...

And regardless of the card you buy, always make sure to go to nVidia or ATI's website, to download & install the latest drivers!

Hope this info helps, take care,

--Noel "HB" Wade
(Tread Whiplash)

The 5200 is what I considerer my "Recommended Minimum" card (as in "minimum for a good experience", as opposed to our technical Minimum System Requirements' "minimum to successfully run the program". It shares virtually the same shader feature list as the higher-clocked cards; in non-geek, it can be pretty even if it isn't as fast as the others. The card you listed is a PCI format: that's a slightly slower bus, but you certainly have a PCI slot. The challenge comes from disabling your other card in Windows and the BIOS.

The 5700 is a faster card. The caveat here is, if your current SL experience is bottlenecked by something else (like your processor), you may not see a marginal difference between the two cards. If your current card's holding you back, however, the 5700 may be a better experience. This card was listed as AGP; an AGP-format card can improve your experience, but of course, you have to have an AGP slot on your motherboard.

I'd go for the 5700 myself, as I never buy the first card of any generation. However, I would (and do) recommend the 5200 to my friends and relatives that don't play a ton of games. If SL's your main game, it depends on what you want go gain from your purchase.

Hope this helps!

To expand upon Lee's statement, yes, the 5700 is a much better card than the 5200, but the 5700LE is NOT. They're about the same, with the 5700LE being marginally better than the 5200.

Go for a 5700, not a 5700LE.