G-Force vs ATI

[Zeorymer]

Currently I have a GeForce Fx5200 with 128MB ram. Im looking for a good upgrade for gamming but I have literally no idea whats good and whats old. help me please!

 

[Nextman916]

try the 7800gtx 512mb

 

[mwmorph]

budget?

 

[Matthias99]

Almost any new card you can get would be an enormous upgrade over a 5200 (epecially if that is a 64-bit FX5200... *shudder*). Please search for many, many, MANY threads asking essentially the same thing.

 

[Rinaun]

Personally i favor Geforce. ATI has Craptastic drivers and run extremely hot (my brothers 9800pro is HOT). Just my opinon though........

 

[mwmorph]

Originally posted by: Rinaun100
Personally i favor Geforce. ATI has Craptastic drivers and run extremely hot (my brothers 9800pro is HOT). Just my opinon though........

that's because you've never had a 90*c running 6600gts(~200 degrees F). either will run hot or cool, and drivers are debatable. I find the custom NGO drivers i'm using now, based on the 5.13 release are faster to boot than the custom NGO nvidia drivers, the last of which I used were the 71.xx.

Stock ATI drivers suck a lot though. Catalyst Control Center is your only option past 5.11 with the ATI offical drivers(Control Panel was killed off) and the .net programming along with the whole damn idea just sucks. expect long freezes, prolonging your bootup by minutes and just being buggy and unresponsive in general.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: mwmorph

Originally posted by: Rinaun100
Personally i favor Geforce. ATI has Craptastic drivers and run extremely hot (my brothers 9800pro is HOT). Just my opinon though........

that's because you've never had a 90*c running 6600gts(~200 degrees F). either will run hot or cool, and drivers are debatable.

Card temperatures depend mostly on the cooling used (although obviously a card that dissipates more power will need better cooling to reach the same temperatures). For the last few generations, ATI has actually had cards that generally use less power (which makes them easier to cool, although obviously any particular cooler can be good or bad). And NVIDIA has had some pretty hot cards (*cough*5800Ultra*cough*). The GF7800s are actually less power-hungry than the RX1800s, though.

Stock ATI drivers suck a lot though. Catalyst Control Center is your only option past 5.11 with the ATI offical drivers(Control Panel was killed off) and the .net programming along with the whole damn idea just sucks. expect long freezes, prolonging your bootup by minutes and just being buggy and unresponsive in general.

The new .NET update from MS helps a lot with the startup time and unresponsiveness when changing certain settings in CCC (which at least makes it seem like it's not entirely ATI's fault). I have not found it to be 'buggy' (though I'm not sure exactly what you mean by that), at least in the last 4-6 months. I wasn't using it until somewhere around 5.6 or so.

Personally, I'm not a big fan of the way NVIDIA lays out their CP. The 'have a second menu pop out of the side of the driver tab' thing is totally nonstandard and confusing; if you're going to have a control panel plugin, it should behave like a standard control panel tab. IMO, anyway. They also release driver updates very infrequently, and there are usually three or four different beta drivers floating around at any given time. I much prefer ATI's "release one update a month" program.

 

[Zeorymer]

I was looking at an advertisement that said

BFG GeForce? 7800 GT OC? 256MB
PCI Express?

Does the brand of the card matter as long as the speed and chipset are the same?
What is PCI Express and how is it different from a normal card?

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Zeorymer
I was looking at an advertisement that said

BFG GeForce? 7800 GT OC? 256MB
PCI Express?

Does the brand of the card matter as long as the speed and chipset are the same?
What is PCI Express and how is it different from a normal card?

Please use the search function.

Brand does not (normally) affect performance unless clocks have been changed, but it does affect things like warranty and bundled hardware/software.

Most new cards are PCI Express, which is replacing AGP as the new video card slot standard. However, there are many cards that are in AGP and are still much faster than a 5200. Please search for lots and lots and LOTS of info on this topic.

 

[Corporate Thug]

Originally posted by: mwmorph
budget?

 

[Corporate Thug]

Originally posted by: Rinaun100
Personally i favor Geforce. ATI has Craptastic drivers and run extremely hot (my brothers 9800pro is HOT). Just my opinon though........

maybe its just your bros card? i have used atleast 5 9800s in my time and never had a heating issue

 

[mwmorph]

Originally posted by: Matthias99

Originally posted by: mwmorph

Originally posted by: Rinaun100
Personally i favor Geforce. ATI has Craptastic drivers and run extremely hot (my brothers 9800pro is HOT). Just my opinon though........

that's because you've never had a 90*c running 6600gts(~200 degrees F). either will run hot or cool, and drivers are debatable.

Card temperatures depend mostly on the cooling used (although obviously a card that dissipates more power will need better cooling to reach the same temperatures). For the last few generations, ATI has actually had cards that generally use less power (which makes them easier to cool, although obviously any particular cooler can be good or bad). And NVIDIA has had some pretty hot cards (*cough*5800Ultra*cough*). The GF7800s are actually less power-hungry than the RX1800s, though.

Stock ATI drivers suck a lot though. Catalyst Control Center is your only option past 5.11 with the ATI offical drivers(Control Panel was killed off) and the .net programming along with the whole damn idea just sucks. expect long freezes, prolonging your bootup by minutes and just being buggy and unresponsive in general.

The new .NET update from MS helps a lot with the startup time and unresponsiveness when changing certain settings in CCC (which at least makes it seem like it's not entirely ATI's fault). I have not found it to be 'buggy' (though I'm not sure exactly what you mean by that), at least in the last 4-6 months. I wasn't using it until somewhere around 5.6 or so.

Personally, I'm not a big fan of the way NVIDIA lays out their CP. The 'have a second menu pop out of the side of the driver tab' thing is totally nonstandard and confusing; if you're going to have a control panel plugin, it should behave like a standard control panel tab. IMO, anyway. They also release driver updates very infrequently, and there are usually three or four different beta drivers floating around at any given time. I much prefer ATI's "release one update a month" program.

I should check into this new .net update. where can I get it windows update? I used cats 5.12 before switching to NGO 5.13 for about 2 days. annoyed the hell out of me. It would mess up my pc by making the boot time 7-9 minutes, freeze a lto when using it and sometimes, though it;s sorta hard to believe, but i;ve never had the problem running nvidia's drivers or even the control panel cats, my internet would get messed up. I would double clikc firefox and it would take up memory and a process slot in my task manager but it would have no results, it would not start up. There would be as many processes of firefox for as many times i tried to start it. Then internet explorer would start but it would be permenantly stuck on deteting proxy settings. Nothing like this has happened since or before CCC.

 

[Gstanfor]

Originally posted by: Corporate Thug

Originally posted by: Rinaun100
Personally i favor Geforce. ATI has Craptastic drivers and run extremely hot (my brothers 9800pro is HOT). Just my opinon though........

maybe its just your bros card? i have used atleast 5 9800s in my time and never had a heating issue

I've lost count of the number of times I've read posts about 9800 cards with failing/failed fans. Either the default fan is extremely crappy or something causes these failures (yes, I know, there are some fan failures on nVidia cards too, but not nearly as many, and you can pretty much single out XFX as the culprit - crap components & QC).

 

[Munky]

To make a long story short, a nice AGP card is the 6600gt for somewhere between $100 and $150. It's not the fastest, but its WAY faster than a fx5200, and unless you already have a fast A64 system then any more expensice card would be bottlenecked by the cpu. Also, modern games require at least 1 gig of system RAM for best performance, so make sure you have that too.

 

[mwmorph]

Originally posted by: Gstanfor

Originally posted by: Corporate Thug

Originally posted by: Rinaun100
Personally i favor Geforce. ATI has Craptastic drivers and run extremely hot (my brothers 9800pro is HOT). Just my opinon though........

maybe its just your bros card? i have used atleast 5 9800s in my time and never had a heating issue

I've lost count of the number of times I've read posts about 9800 cards with failing/failed fans. Either the default fan is extremely crappy or something causes these failures (yes, I know, there are some fan failures on nVidia cards too, but not nearly as many, and you can pretty much single out XFX as the culprit - crap components & QC).

the 9800s, heck the 9xxx series itself was hughely popular while the 5xxx were not nearly so. that coupled with the weak stock fan, more samples=more failures. crappy fan=more failures. 9800pros dont run hot at all. it is normal for any card to burn you when operating at load.

 

[Gstanfor]

Originally posted by: mwmorph

Originally posted by: Gstanfor

Originally posted by: Corporate Thug

Originally posted by: Rinaun100
Personally i favor Geforce. ATI has Craptastic drivers and run extremely hot (my brothers 9800pro is HOT). Just my opinon though........

maybe its just your bros card? i have used atleast 5 9800s in my time and never had a heating issue

I've lost count of the number of times I've read posts about 9800 cards with failing/failed fans. Either the default fan is extremely crappy or something causes these failures (yes, I know, there are some fan failures on nVidia cards too, but not nearly as many, and you can pretty much single out XFX as the culprit - crap components & QC).

the 9800s, heck the 9xxx series itself was hughely popular while the 5xxx were not nearly so. that coupled with the weak stock fan, more samples=more failures. crappy fan=more failures. 9800pros dont run hot at all. it is normal for any card to burn you when operating at load.

Why do people insist on taking comments I make out of context??? Did I mention GF-FX cards at all? I am talking nVidia cards overall, not just the nVidia competitor at the time of 9800's release (and the number of fan failures is still neglible compared to Ati). My 5900's fan still functions perfectly FWIW. Its good to hear someone admit the 9800 stock fan was weak, I'd rather a slightly noisy fan than a weak fan any day, at least I don't have to worry about my card burning up.

 

[VIAN]

Yeah dude, what's your budget? We can't make a proper recommendation without knowing your budget.

I agree with Matthias99 and I prefer ATI cards and drivers.

 

[jevans64]

I'll have to assume you are running AGP.

Look at the Sapphire x800GTO ( ATI GPU ) or maybe the Asus 6800XT ( nVidia GPU ). Expect to pay $150 to $160 for these cards. You probably can get lucky on eBay as these are lots of them up there now and pick up an x850pro for about the same amount plus shipping. The x850pro has a higher clock than the x800GTO.

You will have to head to eBay for AGP versions of the x800xt or 6800GT. Expect to get in a bidding war over these and pay $250 to $280.

 

[rancherlee]

Microcenter is going to have the X850XT for 199.99$ on newyears day......... X850XT@199$ > ANY OTHER AGP CARD ON THE MARKET

 

[ub3rnewb]

6800XT is crap. A 6600GT will do as good or better for a lower price.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: mwmorph
I should check into this new .net update. where can I get it windows update? I used cats 5.12 before switching to NGO 5.13 for about 2 days. annoyed the hell out of me. It would mess up my pc by making the boot time 7-9 minutes, freeze a lto when using it and sometimes, though it;s sorta hard to believe, but i;ve never had the problem running nvidia's drivers or even the control panel cats, my internet would get messed up. I would double clikc firefox and it would take up memory and a process slot in my task manager but it would have no results, it would not start up. There would be as many processes of firefox for as many times i tried to start it. Then internet explorer would start but it would be permenantly stuck on deteting proxy settings. Nothing like this has happened since or before CCC.

Here is the download page for the .NET 2.0 framework package. I think you can also get it through Windows Update.

I don't know what the problem was, but I can assure you all those things are NOT normal behavior with CCC installed and working correctly. If I had to guess, I would say maybe the .NET stuff didn't get installed correctly.