Question.HD2900XT or 8800GTS

[Davros]

"there's no way in hell i'd swap it for an 8800 now. After using CCC for a couple of hours, i'm damn glad that I have ATT to go back to. I couldn't imagine using a videocard without it... "


Sobek you do realise that your basing your gfx card purchase on how good a 3rd party app is

 

[AlexV]

Consider? Oh lord no, I can say with absolute certainty that it's quiet...'quiter', even. There's no two ways about it, this thing is half as loud as my x1900 ever was with the exact same PSU / Cooling setup. The most I have heard from this thing so far was while playing ArmA, and that was with framerate-destroyingly detailed scenes (ie; hundreds of units spammed into a test map all over the place, bringing the FPS down to about 10 or so), and even then it was a bare whisp of air for about 2 seconds. I don't know how hot it's running since i'm not presently using CCC (did for a while, the god awfull Profile management made me uninstall it).

Perhaps these reviewers are doing their reviews in hotbox rooms with no aircon, and no cooling bar their CPU HSF installed. It's the only way they could conceive of it being so loud. Either that or I got a super-special silent edition card. Perhaps it's because i've got one of the 3-pipe heatsink design versions, keeping temps lower?



More like; Works well with a 'substandard' (By ATi's terms) PSU and decent cooling, with a lot of additional components all running at the same time.



Oh you

The thing is, it's not the fog issue that's bugging me, it's the performance... and contrary to what you say, I don't see any mention of performance issue fixes in that upcoming release. Hmm? I hope it does something about it though!

I second the noise thing. What most of those that haven't gone through the x1900xt "up/down/up/down/rocket launch" noise hell can't appreciate how much of an improvement the 2900s are. Compared to nV though, the point is moot, as unless there are some 5800ultra users around, no comparable experience has existed. Aaah, the good old days of powering up the system and hearing the healthy roar of the second X1900XT in my CF configuration, making sure that everyone around the house and the neighbours knew I was using my PC(the second board didn't downkick its fan until the OS booted-up-kinky).

 

[Rainbow Man]

Sobek you do realise that your basing your gfx card purchase on how good a 3rd party app is

Hey AtiTool (if that's the one youy/him are referring to) is great.,

Best damn tweaker I ever tried.

I used it all the time when I had an ATi vidcard. Probably the only reason I don't have ATi right now is the PCs I bought most recently came with NV cards.

Peace.

 

[Albuquerque]

I can't vouch for the 2900, but I know my brothers' ATI x1950 that I just finished building two months ago had some serious fan noise too. However, to their credit, it was a single-slot cooler. But it still made quite the racket at bootup and whenever you were playing a 'heavy' game.

My overclocked 7900GT is FAR quieter than his x1950.

 

[Kurt]

Compared to nV though, the point is moot, as unless there are some 5800ultra users around, no comparable experience has existed.

I take your word for it (having never used an AMD card to this day) but I thought the ASUS 6800GT I had a while ago was pretty noisy. It had a custom cooler with stupid blue LEDs and the fan speed had to be adjusted by running this ASUS tool app (forget the name right now) Without it it would run 100% all the time and that was hell after the super-quiet 5900XT I had before. Luckily I got a 7800GS under warranty and that was just as quiet as the FX. Now I'm on a cheap 8800GTS 640MB (Zotac or something) and it's very, very quiet. Doesn't get too hot either inside the case. I only have too smallish extra fans in the back but the case is very roomy, so...

 

[swaaye]

I have a friend with a BFG 6800 GT OC. Instead of using NV's reference cooler, they rigged up some awful dual-40mm fan thing that's not all that great. It's not all that loud though. He also picked up a 7900 GTX much more recently and that thing has a wonderful cooler on it. 80 mm fan in the middle; it's basically inaudible.

I skipped the goofy ATI Flow-FX wannabe that was on the X850XT and later cards.... I had a X800GTO2 with an Arctic Cooling Silencer. That card came out-of-the-box with a low-profile cooler that I've never used. The AC Silencers, however, are very quiet until their crappy bearings get worn. The company will happily ship you a new fan though, from China, if you ask. Long warranties on those coolers.

My 8800 GTX is extremely quiet until I get a demanding game going. I doubt it can be heard unless you stick your head near it. But, in Oblivion especially, it will spin up to full speed and that is definitely not all that quiet. My PC is otherwise quite quiet because I've carefully picked fans (and 7-volted a few of them). I'm sure the cooler could be better; it is, after all, almost entirely aluminum, dumps half of its air into the case, and actually doesn't have as much surface area as it appears from outside of that huge plastic shroud.

 

[Sobek]

"there's no way in hell i'd swap it for an 8800 now. After using CCC for a couple of hours, i'm damn glad that I have ATT to go back to. I couldn't imagine using a videocard without it... "

Sobek you do realise that your basing your gfx card purchase on how good a 3rd party app is

Well, given how happy I am becoming (or am?) with this card, it's the 3rd party apps that make or break the experience, at least for me. ATT just makes day to day use of cards like this such a breeze, the profile system alone is astonishingly good... It's nice being able to set any and every tweak (of which there are hundreds) on a D3D / OpenGL basis for each and every game, along with things like overclocking profiles and various forms of AA / AF, all literally one click away...makes life so easy. I used CCC again for an hour or so at one stage, and I just couldn't stick to it. The profile system they use is godawfull, I couldn't even get to the point of specifying what levels of AA or AF I wanted for what particular game, let alone anything else I might want to change. And CCC uses a truckload of memory still, 40+ in my case. It just doesn't cut it.

 

[swaaye]

I use ATT fairly frequently, myself. It's ok until you need multi-monitor controls (which it doesn't have much support for). The game profiles are the only way to get such things on ATI hardware, and are similar to what NV does right out of the box. CCC is simply a POS but is necessary for dual head setup and perhaps video options. NV's CP is better than CCC in every way, IMO.

ATITool is also a favorite for me. I use it even with NV hardware. I haven't really adapted to the counter-productive ways of Rivatuner. It's powerful, but accessing the various pages is not very efficiently implemented, IMO.

I've found that Ultramon is great for some multi monitor feature control. nTune is god awful terrible, btw. Stick with ATITool or Rivatuner for NV hardware.

 

[Sobek]

Has ATI Tool evolved much? I only ever used it back 'in the day' on my 9700 Pro, and that was for overclocking (which is pointless on videocards, really.) Is it still just a tool for overclocking? Or has it expanded at all?

 

[ShaidarHaran]

Shaidar,
Yup it's loud. 9 decibels louder than a GTX, and decibels aren't linear.

7.3 decibels louder, actually. Loud is a subjective term, and really depends on the environment. I had a CF X1900 XTX system last year and *rarely* ever heard the GPU fans above my PSU fan (Silverstone Zeus 650W). Certain spots in Oblivion and F.E.A.R. the fans would ramp up for a few seconds or maybe even a minute, but it wasn't even a consideration 99% of the time.

The fact that it uses similar power but is significantly louder is just another oops on ATI's part. When will they build a quiet cooler? After the crap they've put out over the years (R480 and R5x0 high end coolers, for ex).....

My GTX gets quite loud when the fan spins up in some games. It's enough to annoy me. Go louder than that and I think you're approaching FX Flow.

I find it ridiculous really just how hot these NV and ATI cards get. They are so hot that they are seriously becoming an engineering challenge to cool down. The aftermarket coolers are slim pickings and are usually insanely huge, unless you want to go water (no thx).

They wouldn't build em if the infrastructure wasn't out there to support them.

And those power usage levels are just as nuts as the heat output. An idling G80 or R600 is using a significant portion of the total power usage. What a waste of electricity.

I never understood the complaint about wasting electricity from anyone that would spend thousands on PC equipment annually (i.e. enthusiasts). Unless power costs in your area are prohibitive, what does it matter?

 

[BRiT]

I second the noise thing. What most of those that haven't gone through the x1900xt "up/down/up/down/rocket launch" noise hell can't appreciate how much of an improvement the 2900s are.

I upgraded from an X1900XT to an 8800GTX. By comparison, the 8800GTX is silent. You might think the 2900 is quiet, but the 8800GTX is even quieter. When I ran with the stock air cooling, several times I had to mute the audio, pause the game, and stick a notecard into the fan to make sure it was still running. Nvidia really nailed the heatsink fan on their 8800 GTX series.

I never thought CCC was that bad for the few times I'd have to use it. After having used Nvidia's control panel in Vista, I see exactly how clumsy CCC is.

ShaidarHaran,
Actually, Unless you use some new fancy math, it's 9.1 dB: 53 - 43.9 (2900 1GB - 8800 GTX). You say it's subjective, but you can not deny that it's perceived as being nearly twice as loud (10 dB is a perceived doubling of volume).

As for the complaint about power, it's more about how it translates into heat. The more power it draws, the more heat it produces.

 

[AlexV]

I upgraded from an X1900XT to an 8800GTX. By comparison, the 8800GTX is silent. You might think the 2900 is quiet, but the 8800GTX is even quieter. When I ran with the stock air cooling, several times I had to mute the audio, pause the game, and stick a notecard into the fan to make sure it was still running. Nvidia really nailed the heatsink fan on their 8800 GTX series.

Having heard GTXs, that's also quite true. It is quieter, but the 2900s are OK, which, for ATi, is a huge step forward, considering how obnoxious their coolers used to be. That's all, I don't want to get into the silly pissing match of having belief in the 2900/the 2900 sucks/whatever. It is what it is and that's that, no ammount of fanboyism and belief in mystical driver releases will turn it into something more than lukewarm/mediocre(all things considered), nor will ripping it a new one demote it from that status.

 

[Tim]

Actually, Unless you use some new fancy math, it's 9.1 dB: 53 - 43.9 (2900 1GB - 8800 GTX). You say it's subjective, but you can not deny that it's perceived as being nearly twice as loud (10 dB is a perceived doubling of volume).

As for the complaint about power, it's more about how it translates into heat. The more power it draws, the more heat it produces.

Actually you are wrong, 10dB is ten times the power, 3dB is about twice the power and is generally also perceived as twice as loud by the average person.

Edit: Typo

 

[AlexV]

Actually you are wrong, 10dB is ten times the power, 3dB is about twice the power and is generally also perceived as twice loud by the average person.

"Noise" scales logarithmically, right?So, yes, you're right

 

[swaaye]

I never understood the complaint about wasting electricity from anyone that would spend thousands on PC equipment annually (i.e. enthusiasts). Unless power costs in your area are prohibitive, what does it matter?

Because I like to have a computer on 24/7 for things other than games. I remote into it from work, to access stuff at home. Having a comp that uses ~170W idle powered up 24/7 is a waste of electricity, whether it's cheap or not. And it is really very cheap where I live. But does that mean I should just be wasteful with it? Nah.

So, I have a older eMachines Athlon64 laptop setup as a desktop machine. It uses ~35 W idle. The big rig stays off most of the time now.

Besides I burn up enough electricity during the summer with the AC on.....boy is it hot and humid this week.

 

[BRiT]

Actually you are wrong, 10dB is ten times the power, 3dB is about twice the power and is generally also perceived as twice as loud by the average person.

Edit: Typo

Actually I am correct. You are partially correct. I did not post anything about the "power". I posted "perceived noise volume". Perhaps you should actually read what I posted.

Experimentally it was found that a 10 dB increase in sound level corresponds approximately to a perceived doubling of loudness / Because "loudness" is a psycho-physical response, it can be said that an increase 10dB is a doubling in "loudness" even though the dB scale is base 10 logarithmetric.

 

[Sobek]

So it's a bit more noisy (apparently... Since 8800GTX's are quieter than my old x1900, and my 2900 is quieter than my x1900 too, I couldn't give two shits if the 2900 is louder by any amount than the 8800 because it's still quieter than my damn x1900 ).

Stop arguing about the noise, it's damn quiet. Been playing lots of DiRT, and bar when there's 5 other cars on screen, it runs shockingly nice. Moreso than I expected... But there are still those couple of games where it's strangely outperformed by my x1900 (which in each case the x1900 bests the 2900 by a good 100%). So no idea why that happens (even when there's no AA in the mix), but otherwise it's been great.

 

[Davros]

Been playing lots of DiRT, and bar when there's 5 other cars on screen, it runs shockingly nice. Moreso than I expected...

thats bloody terrible cant handle 6 cars....

 

[Sobek]

Tell me about it, it actually crashed earlier. I was doing a rally raid, and i'd been at it for about 6 minutes... On my final lap, on the final turn, and it was stuttering and chunking and just generally dying, then JUST as I rounded the last corner, finally in the lead..nothing. Instant, silent, lockup. The image just stopped, all sound stopped, and that was it...no squeals, no BSOD's, nothing. It was kinda scary, but at the same time it was mocking me. For you see, the game froze so perfectly as to show me rounding the corner in a handslide, leaving everyone else behind in the dust, and the finish line perfectly centered on screen.

Intentional crash? I think so.

But seriously... When more than one car comes on screen, the game is pretty much unplayable. It stutters and speeds up or slows down constantly, making tricky maneuvers literally impossible. I can't count how many times on that rally raid I was forced to start over because it stuttered like crazy and nearly died as I rounded the edge to cross the finish line. It'd start stuttering, i'd hit a jump and hit right to start straightening out, but because it's 'paused' so badly, when it resumes it severly overturns and sends me either out into the bush, or into a wall.

Pretty shit, but that's what you get from Codemasters.

 

[Malo]

I can't say I've encountered anything like that in DiRT on my 2900. I play with almost everything maxed at 1680x1050 with 4xAA and it seems fine with 6 cars on the screen at once.