One of those "What should I buy" threads... (Radeo

[martrox]

Some motherboards seem to like different power supplies. Weird, but true. Shuttle AK31v3.1 seem to prefer Enermax to Antec, Epox 8K7a hate Enermax but seem to work fine with Antec. And ECS K7S5A's really only seem to like Powersupplies that are on AMD's approved list......

 

[Randell]

mstuttard - congratulations.

remember www.rage3d.com is the best place for troubleshooting enquiries.

Also the leap in performance will only really start to show when AA and AF are enabled.

 

[Nite_Hawk]

Randell:

I don't know about that, I've got a gf3 ti200 too, and some of those benchmark scores even without any af or aa make me feel aq bit er... inadequate. (on a 1466MHz athlon)

Nite_Hawk

 

[martrox]

I think Randell is talking about the 9700.....
However, I agree with you and it's the reason I do feel the TI4200 is a very good upgrade for a TI200....of course, a 9500 might be better....

 

[ChrisK]

...

Well, I bought one of those 9700s as well, despite earlier vows not to.

But when my old system broke (one of the plastic hooks of the CPU socket couldn't hold the weight of the heavy CPU cooler any more and the Athlon, the mainboard and the memory were fried - ouch) and I had to order new hardware, the freak split personality in me took over control and clicked on that expensive Sapphire card and the "Order" button before I could help myself

An interesting detail of the installation - and probably an advice worth sharing - is that you seem to have to install the Radeon drivers after you have installed new nForce drivers (which is the mainboard I'm on now - nForce 415D), since I had the impression that the chipset driver installs OpenGL drivers as well. Took me a few hours before the thought of installing the same video drivers again came to me. Before that, I wondered why I only had very slow (software?) OpenGL. General performance suffered as well before I had fixed this - stuttering in games and a dramatic decrease of the "High Polygon Count" test in 3D Mark 2001 (to about 1/6th the performance it has now).

But now the system is stable and performs as expected. It's been a while since I had a video card that could be considered high end. The original TNT in 1998, probably, but that lagged behind the V2 SLI. The best bet might be Riva 128 in 1997 - but some will likely debate that

Chris

 

[mstuttard]

Update

Well I got the Radeon 9700 and PSU, all installed now. Haven't done much benchmarking yet, but have just played a bit of the Unreal Tournament 2003 demo..... 1280 x 960 with high everything was a sight to behold! Ran perfectly, with the drivers out of the box at the moment too. Am impressed so far, will try to let you guys know what benchmarks come out of it.

Cheers for all the help, as of right now am definitely happy with my new purchases!

 

[Randell]

Randell:

I don't know about that, I've got a gf3 ti200 too, and some of those benchmark scores even without any af or aa make me feel aq bit er... inadequate. (on a 1466MHz athlon)

Nite_Hawk

well most benches seem to be on 2.5gig P4's so I was giving some credit to CPU power

 

[Dio]

Your APC provides a very clean signal. This is important because, according to overclockers the Enermax cables are TOO long - making them more suceptible to noise. This was also stated in an Ace's article, they used a Super Sparkle or something like that PSU instead.

You're not wrong. I do wish Enermax would supply some shorter cables.

But I'm not sure this argument holds up; because even if the UPS isn't actually generating power (it's line-interactive, not on-line) but is instead cutting a couple of turns off the transformer to reduce the line voltage (voltage bucking, cuts in at about 249V and brings it down to 227), the PC still works fine.

Interesting though. I've a couple of ferrite cores I could strap around each end of the MB power line that would reduce the line noise quite a bit...

 

[Ailuros]

Randell,

Assume rumours are true that there will be even 128bit bus 8 piped 9500, then double the raw bandwidth should make more a difference in ultra high resolutions; hence I marked my former prediction as "1024/AA/aniso" scenarios.

 

[Dio]

Your APC provides a very clean signal. This is important because, according to overclockers the Enermax cables are TOO long - making them more suceptible to noise. This was also stated in an Ace's article, they used a Super Sparkle or something like that PSU instead.

One other thing on this - once it's booted, the machine is rock solid stable. I can't remember even once having a BSOD and that's over at least 18 months, no unusual application failures either. It's just getting it to boot that's a pain in the proverbial.

 

[Randell]

Randell,

Assume rumours are true that there will be even 128bit bus 8 piped 9500, then double the raw bandwidth should make more a difference in ultra high resolutions; hence I marked my former prediction as "1024/AA/aniso" scenarios.

yep, I was unsure whether a 128bit/4pipe 9500 was enough for me for the cost saving over the 9700, but the 128 bit 8 pipe one may be the ideal compromise. I do not foresee me playing at 1600x1200 in the next 2 years as my next monitor upgrade will be a 12x10 LCD.

 

[Pete]

Well, if anyone else reads this thread looking for advice, and you can't wait until you build your next PC, I'd recommend buying your new case + PSU along with the 9700. No need to pay for an extra PSU that'll end up going to waste, anyway. Just put your current PC and new 9700 in the new case, and transfer it back to the old case when you get around to buying your new PC.