Help Me Pick A Graphics Card (AGP)

The Rules: I have no desire to spend any more than $175 on my three year-old PC. I also have no desire to replace my mobo, cpu, ram and/or PS, so aside from maybe throwing some additional RAM in there, the graphics card is the only thing I will even consider upgrading at this point, so don't waste your time trying to tell me I should get PCI-E board, as it's not an option I'm willing to consider at this time.

My current SL box:

1. Asus SK8N Mobo (AGP 8X/Pro GFX Card Slot)
   
2. Opteron 144 (1.8 GHz Sledgehammer)
   
3. 1 GB RAM (PC3200 ECC Registered Dual Channel - 2 x 512MB matched pair)
   
4. (2x36GB) RAID 0 - 10k RPM SATA (1.5Gb/s) HDD's
   
5. NVidia FX5900 128MB driving a 1280 x 1024 19" CRT
   

It runs alright, but after seeing how much faster SL runs on my MacBook Pro, I decided it was time to bump up my desktop machine.

Here are the two cards I've narrowed my decision down to:
The Leadtek has a faster clock speed and faster RAM than the BFG, but the BFG has twice as much RAM.

I realize that for most games, the 7600GT would be superior, but I'm wondering if for SL the card with the greater amount of VRAM might not help more given how texture-intensive SL is?

I've already got a 7600GS sitting in my office unopened, so I'm holding off until Monday to make a final decision and I'd like input from those of you who've had first-hand experience with more modern cards than me.

Which card would you get for a dedicated SL machine and I'd apprciate hearing why you vote the way you did.

7600GT - 560mhz, 1400mhz, 256ddr3
7600GS - 420mhz, 800mhz, 512ddr2

Go GT, faster, ram is less but SL eh...SL dont remember diddly squat anyway, and its better for any other game youd might want to try sometime.

Tp away and back it already forgotten, you can check ram use on vid card in client/texture console, usually hoovers around 100 ish nowadays, go look at a ton of people attachment and clothes

For dac stuff, id go with more memory one cause they just eat ram, sizes on some cad' are bigbigbig.


http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics.html

aye i agree, go faster ... video memory for SL is mostly a futile attempt, get a 1 terabit card i bet an average club scene will use it ..

Which of the benchmarks that Tom's Hardware uses do you think best matches SL usage?

probally 3d mark, its quality is average with most moderen games, but its made to really stress the crap out of your computer ... SL is simmilar HIGH loads but lacks the quality

Doh. Looks like I get to go back to Fry's this weekend and return the 7600GS.

I got impatient and it was sitting there calling my name, so I decided to go ahead and try it out but it really wasn't a noticeably huge improvement for SL, so I'm not reluctant to return it and wait for the 7600GT (can't find it anywhere locally yet).

Thanks for the input. I'll update with some numbers later in case others are curious.

Well you will get some increase in fps, but dont really expect alot,

Though going from a fx5900, to a 7600 would show some new things it can do without breaking a sweat.

Im on a 7900gt card for SL its barly any fps diffrence from my older 6800gt, but in other games it blows it away :> (pcie)

My b.brother has a 6800gt agp card, and theres no fps diffrence from his and my 6800gt pci (sl)

SL still want 95% cpu , 4% ram , 1% gpu

If I remmeber correctly the big advantage of the Opteron is that you can shove multiples in the same machine.

You may want to rethink your decision, drop the price of the graphics card your getting and get a better CPU. I don't even know if your board will support a better CPU though.

I'm in the same boat. I have a 3 year old AGP machine and I'm trying to decide the best way to upgrade it. My current thought is save my money and upgrade the entire thing at once, that way I can upgrade my wifes computer at the same time.

I am Leadtek. these cards are bomb proof. I Only have a 128 6600gt but i have wonderful frame rates. I know people that have thee cards for a very long long time.

i like leadtek and PNY

ive got a leadtek geforce DDR that still works like a champ tru my abuse
ive got a PNY geforce 2 GTS severly overclocked that still works like a champ

my roomates E-VGA geforce 6600 ... ive had to replace the fan 2 times now in under 9 months on the stinky heatsync i really wouldnt trust on a 20 watt audio amplifer let alone a heat raging video card (nevermind we had to return it 3 times)

btw my last 3 cards have been leadtek or PNY, good stuff asus makes a decent one also

The 7600GT is the better card hands down. The slower 512 memory isn't an advantage over the speedier DDR3 in SL. SL is quite content with a 128 meg card and I have rarely ever seen it go above 120 meg in use. I see no difference between my 6800Ultra with 512meg running at 512 or 128 and a little difference if set to 64meg. The last time I talked to Dan and Vektor Linden, LL didn't even have a fancy, shmancy 512 meg video card to test with (Vektor's words I believe) even though they put in the option to support it. Video memory isn't a huge concern to SL. Also, the FX 5900 series cards were very capable cards and SL was mainly developed on them so you won't see an earth shattering difference. You will, however, find you can raise the AA and AF settings on the card itself and find SL will look significantly better without loosing as much FPS.

With the SK8N mobo and the CPU's available when I built this machine, the Opteron was the only way to get access to the dual channel RAM capabilities of the board aside from the Athlon 64 FX CPU's which were and still are crazy expensive.

I can actually still upgrade it surprisingly well.

The official list of supported CPU's shows up to an Opteron 150 or 250 (2.4 GHz) and I ran across a benchmark list showing at least two people that had SK8N mobo's with FX-53's or whichever one it is that's 2.8GHz.

I've got a good friend who works for a small shop that gets a lot of refurb and overstock pc stuff, so I'm going to see if he has any 250's around and try upgrading the CPU.

I'm also trying to get a hold of some more RAM, but it seems the sticks I have are still crazy expensive $300+ for a pair of 512MB sticks). If anyone has a pair of Corsair TWINX1024RE-3200LL laying around, I'll gladly take it off your hands. And the SK8N doesn't support mixing RAM sticks of different speeds and timings, so I either have to find some that matches what I have or ditch it and get something else.

I didn't look closely at your memory before. You have a rock solid server on your hands. Your best bet is probably to find somebody who needs a stable machine for a database server and sell him the machine and buy yourself a good game machine.


ECC, registered memory is detrimental to a game machines performance.

Yeah. Though I do have the ECC disabled and it's running in dual channel mode, plus it's low latency stuff.

But...yeah. I'm starting to lean that direction too. I just don't/can't build a whole new machine right now. If I get much beyond a couple hundred dollars upgrading here, I'd rather just go ahead and replace my old G4 PowerMac with a shiny new Mac Pro that will also run Windows when needed and kill two birds with one stone.

It's definitely a rock solid machine though. Once I got rid of my original Audigy soundcard and its crappy drivers, it hasn't bluescreened once in nearly three years.

I ended up taking the 7600GS back and snagged myself an Opteron 250 (2.4 GHz) for only $130. That should be a nice improvement over my 144 (1.8 GHz).

Should be here in a day or two.

Still waiting for the 7600GT's to become in stock at a time when I can actually jump and place the order as soon as I get the in stock notification from newegg. So far, I'm 0 for 3. Probably best to wait til I see what the faster CPU does for me anyhow.

very good happy to hear you found your needs

I'm curious, would a 6800gs not be as good, or better than a 7600gt because of it's 256bit memory bus, or would the higher core speed (or some other feature) in the 7x outweight that advantage?

<< trying desperately to escape from the ATI 9250 *pci* (gads!) pos her husband dropped on her. It's amazing.. he buys me Wacoms and GSkill ram, but wants to saddle me with that crap.

http://forums.vr-zone.com/showthread.php?p=2400829

AND


http://www.short-media.com/forum/showthread.php?t=43899

These two should give you all the details and habits of any graphic card around

Hope this helps

Got my Opteron 250 (2.4 GHz) in yesterday, along with a nice Zalman heatpipe/fins/fan combo to keep it cool. Let nTune do it's thing and have the Opteron 250 running perfectly smooth at a hair over 2.6 GHz now.

Also, just for the heck of it, I flashed my FX5900 card to a FX5950 Ultra, which allowed it to be overclocked another 30 MHz over what nTune would let me do before flashing it and it runs cooler to boot...but that doesn't matter much now as I was finally sitting not just near but actually at a computer when I got an in-stock alert from newegg this evening alerting me that they had received some 7600GT's. I now have one on the way!

Ok, that was some good info, but I've found something else that seems to show that either specs don't tell the whole story, or that something is wacked with those charts... I'll link an article that shows the 7600GT coming out well on top where according to specs the 6800GS should seemingly spank that card (6800GS 256-bit bus w/32GB throughput vs 7600GT 128-bit bus w/22.4GB throuput). This is kinda the magic mojo I was alluding to earlier when I said "some other feature".

http://www.hardwarezone.com/articles/view.php?id=2031&cid=3&pg=1

Yep. Saw that last night. Can't wait to get that bad boy in my machine!

Leadtek is some of the best GC around strong and powerful.........The sources i gave are some of the best around.......But going direct the leadtek weksite will over you even more detailed info about that GC........But a over all matric of GC understanding is well done on those websites I posted.......

Heh! I ditched my Audigy about 3-4 yrs ago. I too, kept getting weird BSD's. Now it's just running plain ol' Onboard Audio, which I'm finding has made BIG strides in quality.

I tried that, but ended up going with a Turtle Beach Catalina. Haven't had a single problem with it.

Looks like it's a good thing I went ahead and ordered the card when I did.

The A7600GT doesn't even exist on newegg's site now. Seems like I recall reading somewhere that it was going to be a limited production run card. I guess they weren't joking.

Tom's Hardware also just rated it as the best card for gaming that's currently available for AGP (aside from the unreasonably priced for a defunct slot type $400 Gainward 7800GS+ Golden Sample), so I guess you guys knew what you were talking about after all.

Thanks for all the input and I'll report with some numbers next week when the card arrives!