nvidia 5800 or ati 9700?

[dccool879]

I know these are old cards, and they both performed similarly in the benchmarks i found. But what about in newer games? will they both handle battlefield 2 (and other dx9) similar (and playable) on 800x600 with a p4 2.4 ghz and 1 gig pc2700? it's for a friend, we are building a real cheap computer

 

[pt]

I prefer ATI over NVIDIA so i would go for the 9700 and flash it into a 9800

 

[dccool879]

its actually a 9500 that im gonna softmod to a 9700. there's no way to get a 9500 to a 9800 is there?

 

[pt]

if the card support the 9800XT clocks you can flash to it, wich is your 9500?

 

[Soopahmahn]

1) Radeon 9700 >> FX5800, as far as I know. The FX series was pretty lame... got its ass handed to it quickly by the release of the ATi 9000 series.

2) Is the mobo going to have pci-e? And how cheap are you going? You can get really cheap P4 Prescott/Celeron D mobos with pci-e these days (e.g. Asus P4V8X-MX for 48.99 from NewEgg). I really wouldn't invest in a card that's already 2 gens old, when the computer is obviously intended to do at least some gaming. I had an FX5900 with exactly that setup, 2.4gHz P4 Northwood + 1gb RAM, overclocked it to like 2.6gHz and had the video card OC'ed like 15% core and 20% memory. Sure I could run BF2 @ 800x600 at low quality with maybe 15fps, but it often dipped into slideshow-land when the action got hot.

An FX5800 costs what, $60-70? For that much, from NewEgg.com, you can get a GeForce 7300GS, GeForce 6600LE or ATi open-box X800 or X1600 Pro, or a new X700SE or X1300 Pro. All of those cards, I think, should perform substantially better than an FX5800 or Radeon 9700. I think I would recommend an X1600Pro or open-box X800 and mod the sucker for 16 pipes if you feel like screwing with it.

Edit: sorry, while I was researching I didn't see that you were talking about a 9500, which is $40. Does anyone know how an X550 Hypermemory compares to a 9500? There's also an open-box ASUS Geforce 6600 128MB OEM card at NewEgg for $49.

 

[TXcharger]

um dumb question why not get a better card, but i ran BF2 on a fx5500 and i have a friend whos running it on a 5200, but ur gonna have to settle for low settings

 

[dccool879]

because both these cards are less than 20 dollars on ebay. I think the 5800's go for maybe more than 20, but 9500's have been going for less. i already got a mobo, it was 15 bucks. Also, the 2.4 ghz northwood was 15 dollars because it has some bent pins. This is one cheap computer. Most of the money was spent on the case because we bought a blacklight cathode and black light reflective spray paint lol! the card is the first one "9500NP RED PCB L shaped memory" on http://www.techpowerup.com/softmod/faq.php. it is ati brand 9500. will this go to xt? also tell me if you see any other cheap agp cards!

also, Soopahmahn how did you only get 15 fps with a 5900? my bud has a 512 mb pc with an amd 2800+ socket 754 and a 5900xt and it plays smooth on medium @ 1024x768.

 

[15th Warlock]

The 9700 wins hands down.

Btw, there's no way you can flash a 9700 to a 9800, let alone a 9500 to a 9800XT both use different cores, even though the 9800's R350 core (or the R360 for the 9800XT) is based on the 9700/9500's R300, Ati introduced many improvements on the newer core, like enhanced Z buffer compression, better memory timings and enhanced FSAA and AA performance, hence the higher transistor count in the R350/R360 compared to the R300 (110 million transistors to 105 million transitors iirc), all this makes both cores very different.

Besides, even if it was possible to flash a 9800 bios in a 9500Pro card, I really doubt that a 9500Pro with stock clocks of 275Mhz for the core and 270Mhz for the memory would be capable of reaching the 9800XT stock clocks of 412Mhz for the core and 365Mhz for the memory.

You would have better luck flashing the 9500 to a 9700, but first you have to make sure you have the 256bits version, not the 128bits version, and that your core is stable at 9700 clocks.

 

[b1lk1]

If it is a 5800 Ultra it will demolish the ATI cards. If it is a regular 5800 get the 9700.

 

[dccool879]

its a regular 5800, but the diffrence between the 5800 and 5800 ultra is just clock speeds i thought, just like how the difference between a 9700 and a 9700 pro is clock speeds? the 9500 is cheaper anyways, so im getting that. are 9700 and 9800 pretty identicle too in performance? i thought they were, especially with the new catalysts.

 

[15th Warlock]

It depends. The 9700Pro is about 15~20% slower than the 9800Pro in normal gaming, but the gap grows when you enable FSAA and AA when using the 9800Pro because of the enhancements Ati made to the R350 core. The 9800XT on the other hand, is about 25-30% faster than the 9700Pro.

 

[dccool879]

ya the gaps seem quite small http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NDQ4LDIsLGhlbnRodXNpYXN0
the 9500->9700 will be more than enough, the guy is upgrading from a 1.5 ghz p4 willamette disastor with a geforce 2

 

[15th Warlock]

ya the gaps seem quite small http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NDQ4LDIsLGhlbnRodXNpYXN0
the 9500->9700 will be more than enough, the guy is upgrading from a 1.5 ghz p4 willamette disastor with a geforce 2

Yes, it's gonna give much better performance than the FX5800 IMO, which (as all of the FX series) has terrible SM2.0 support.

Oh, btw, I wouldn't recommend using the review you quote to compare the 9700 to the 9800, as in that review they downclocked the 9800 to 9700 stock clocks just to compare the improvements in the R350 architecture. At stock clocks the 9800 is quite faster than the 9700, check this review instead:

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NDM5LDE=

 

[dccool879]

oh i didn't even read that. can you get 9700 speeds to 9800 easily? or would i need a 3rd party artic freezer or something like that? the 5800 is out of the question now because it got bidded past 20 dollars so it's not worth it, but the comparing a 9700 pro to the 5800. the difference is not that much, and my 9500 is being turned into a 9700 np, so performance still seems like it would be the same as a 5800 nu.

 

[15th Warlock]

Yes, you would certainly need a 3rd party cooler, and even then I doubt you would reach 9800 clocks, unless you voltmod your card. Nevertheless, the 9700 is a great card on its own, and you should be able to play BF2 at 800x600 at high settings (but you'll have to lower texture detail).

 

[dccool879]

how does the nvidia 6200 compare? does this softmod to 6600 if it is 128 bit?

 

[b1lk1]

6200's are terrible as they have ultra slow 64-bit memory. Steer clear and get a 6600 if anything. The 5800ULTRA is a monster of a card, just very hard to find. I believe they use different and much faster memory, but I am honestly not sure. I just know that it was a special card in the 5x00 linup that was basically the best of them all. Why not just get the 6600GT AGP?

 

[cjoyce1980]

You need a 6600GT to beat a 9700 for performance

 

[TXcharger]

or why not splurge and get a X800gto agp from sapphire

 

[pt]

You need a 6600GT to beat a 9700 for performance

A 6600GT even beats a 9800XT in some points

 

[b1lk1]

or why not splurge and get a X800gto agp from sapphire

This is the smartest piece of advice so far! These cards are ridiculously cheap now and would be MUCH MUCH better than the Nvidia 5x00/6x00 cards and the ATI 9x00 cards.

 

[cjoyce1980]

cheap one?!?! you still have to shell out over £100 to get one, even on ebay. get a 6800LE (unlockable one) there cheaper and about the same performance as a X800 and about 2/3 of the price

 

[cjoyce1980]

A 6600GT even beats a 9800XT in some points

it beats it on no points. the 6600GT has a 128bit memory bus, when the 9800XT as a 256bit memory bus, which means that the 6600GT would need to work as twice as fast to keep up with a 9800XT.

 

[15th Warlock]

6200's are terrible as they have ultra slow 64-bit memory. Steer clear and get a 6600 if anything. The 5800ULTRA is a monster of a card, just very hard to find. I believe they use different and much faster memory, but I am honestly not sure. I just know that it was a special card in the 5x00 linup that was basically the best of them all. Why not just get the 6600GT AGP?

I think you are confused, the FX5800Ultra is the laughing stock of plenty of hardware review sites and forums, it was also know as the "dustbuster" because of its huge and very noisy HSF, and didn't deliver the expected performance, so very few of these cards actually made it to the shelves.

The fastest of the FX series card was the FX5950, which could beat the 9700Pro in most benchmarks, but by the time it was released, Ati already was selling the 9800, and would soon deliver a two hit punch combo by releasing the 9800XT.

Today, the FX series are best remembered by their poor SM2.0 support, as evidenced by games like Half Life 2 (who doesn't remember the Radeon 9600 beating the crap out of then nVidia's flagship FX5950 in HL2 when both cards used SM2.0 ), and more recently by newer games like Oblivion, that almost fully dropped the FX series cards from the supported list shortly after release, only barely supporting from the FX5700 onwards, as cards like the FX5200 and 5500 offered dismal framerates when playing Oblivion.

It also wasn't a true 8 pipeline architecture, as nVidia opted by an ill supported "4x2" design, so almost all 8 pipelines Ati cards of the time would beat the FX cards. They are also infamous because of the so called "optimizations" nVidia used in their drivers to deliver higher 3dmark03 scores, by using reduced precision instructions, which in the end produced a lower IQ when compared to the 9x00 cards. The only games in which these cards performed better than the 9x00 series, was in OpenGL based games.

I think it's safe to say that nVidia would prefer to have all references to the FX series buried in the past, as the company had to struggle to keep up with Ati back in the day. In fact, nVidia was out of the 3d high performance game for a while (as shown by the high rate of 9x00 cards sold compared to the FX series), and it was not until the 6 series were released, that nVidia had a real contender to Ati's legendary R3x0 architecture (and afterwards the R4x0 based on this very succesful predecessor)

 

[dccool879]

6200's are terrible as they have ultra slow 64-bit memory. Steer clear and get a 6600 if anything. The 5800ULTRA is a monster of a card, just very hard to find. I believe they use different and much faster memory, but I am honestly not sure. I just know that it was a special card in the 5x00 linup that was basically the best of them all. Why not just get the 6600GT AGP?

ya but i've read that the first 6200's were 128 bit and just were 6600 cores with 4 locked pipelines. http://www.short-media.com/forum/showthread.php?t=35366