Word! Pc's wouldnt be half as much fun if they didnt include loads of fidling, swearing, weird-borderline-legal-hackfixes and they joy of getting something to actually work for a second or two
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8800GTX vs. 2900XT, Duo-Core vs. Quad Core
- Thread starter DraKon2k
- Start date
Word! Pc's wouldnt be half as much fun if they didnt include loads of fidling, swearing, weird-borderline-legal-hackfixes and they joy of getting something to actually work for a second or two
A digression from the topic, but I couldn't resist. Back in the days where AMD Thunderbirds was the king of the hill I set up a new box on a fancy DDR mobo (2nd one to be released, bleeding edge). Little did I know that it would end up being just what it was, in a biological context. Bleeding edge. The cpu cooler was a huge alu thiungy with a Black Delta 7200RPM fan on it. A fan that sounds like a jet plane when you hit the power switch and pushes enough air to drive a line-battle-ship of the 1800s forward.
Stupid as I was I didnt bother to mount the fan guard and even more stupid I stuck my finger into the fan while it was running at max speed (why I don't recall, its a bit bloody..eh foggy I mean). Cut a nice slice off my fingertip and sent blood all over the room. I later found blood in the ceiling o_0
/DFN
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The thing i hate most about new cases is when you put everything in it, connect everything and you feel a real sense of achievement only at that moment you look down to your right to see that you forgot a certain piece of wire which is supposed to be placed before everything else.
Take everything back out and start again!
Take everything back out and start again!
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if you do any 3D work or graphics stuff like I do - the Quad core will blow your socks off - just set the number of threads to 8 and watch all cores fill up to 100%
My current P4 2.8c Northwood o/c to 3.14ghtz gets 289 single thread and 337 with 2 threads in Cinebench v9.5 rendering benchmark
The E6300 is more or less similar in speed to my system in single thread - 326, and 604 with 2 threads
Q6600 quad does - 417 single thread, 1319 with 4! And that's with standard clock speed, crank it up to 3g and your looking around 2000 points!
2000 divided by 337 = 5.9x faster than my system ----- > drool
reminds me of the days I upgraded from a P2 100mhtz system to a P3 500mhz one 5+ times speed boost!
Then from that to my current P4 2.8c at 3.14 to 3.25g, but it can do 3.5g all out....
That's been my motto, only upgrade when I can get at least a 3x speed boost - I want to feel whiplash from the acceleration
I'm glad I waited for a few years. To think I put this system together for HL2, and it was delayed a year too
Q6600 will be my next purchase, and should last the same 4-5 years, and maybe even longer as we are reaching diminishing returns for power and clockspeed, and quad core will last a while. It will be sometime till something is 3x faster than it.....
Even my P4 system is still more than good enough for most things other than gaming on high settings or 3D rendering where more is always better.
anyway wait till the Q6600 price drop, and there will be a new stepping then as well, which will be 10 degrees cooler. So better for overclocking or general lower temps
My current P4 2.8c Northwood o/c to 3.14ghtz gets 289 single thread and 337 with 2 threads in Cinebench v9.5 rendering benchmark
The E6300 is more or less similar in speed to my system in single thread - 326, and 604 with 2 threads
Q6600 quad does - 417 single thread, 1319 with 4! And that's with standard clock speed, crank it up to 3g and your looking around 2000 points!
2000 divided by 337 = 5.9x faster than my system ----- > drool
reminds me of the days I upgraded from a P2 100mhtz system to a P3 500mhz one 5+ times speed boost!
Then from that to my current P4 2.8c at 3.14 to 3.25g, but it can do 3.5g all out....
That's been my motto, only upgrade when I can get at least a 3x speed boost - I want to feel whiplash from the acceleration
I'm glad I waited for a few years. To think I put this system together for HL2, and it was delayed a year too
Q6600 will be my next purchase, and should last the same 4-5 years, and maybe even longer as we are reaching diminishing returns for power and clockspeed, and quad core will last a while. It will be sometime till something is 3x faster than it.....
Even my P4 system is still more than good enough for most things other than gaming on high settings or 3D rendering where more is always better.
anyway wait till the Q6600 price drop, and there will be a new stepping then as well, which will be 10 degrees cooler. So better for overclocking or general lower temps
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Lots of [excellent] talk about the Quadcore, but hardly anyone has really mentioned the 2900XT.
Before you buy it, and I hope you haven't bought it yet, I want to make something aware to you: The 2900XT does not compete with the 8800GTX. It's only designed to compete with the 8800GTS, and even then, it trades blows. If the games are ports over from the XBox360, then you will likely find the performance on the 2900XT to be spectacular, as fundamental core differences between the Xenos chip found on the XBox360 and the R600 chip found on the 2900XT aren't too entirely different. The shader core, however, is a completely different story, as the 320 stream processors on the R600 are extremely complex, capable, and powerful.
But therein lies the problem. The R600 (2900XT) is a fantastic chip, but ATI may have overestimated their capabilities in the ability to drive it along. Certain functions have changed between the R600 and the R500 series. When Anti-Aliasing (AA) and Anisotropic-Filtering (AF) are not enabled on the R600, it is quite a speed demon. Once you start cranking those visual goodies up though, the performance begins to plummet. Since many of the unique filtering methods (Wide/Narrow Tent) are handled on the Stream processors, the performance may or may not be improved with future driver revisions depending on the driver team's ability to manage the thread dispatcher (the thingy that controls what exactly those stream processors are doing: Pixel, Vertex, Geometry, or filtering equations).
The bottom line is this: The 2900XT is sometimes slower, sometimes faster than the 8800GTS. It costs more than the 8800GTS. It exhausts more heat and consumes more power than the 8800GTX. It's not quite the debacle that the Nvidia FX series was, but in all honesty, as much as I love ATI cards, it's not quite the performance I was expecting this round.
Even still, it has a few things going for it:
-Console ports will probably run more smoothly using one.
-You can fold with it, and current performance is ~2.2x faster than current R580 speeds, though this ~2.2x performance level is NOT actually limited by the card itself. Supposed to be improved even more with time. Hey, some people like to fold!
-Driver improvement shows promise in boosting its performance. Still, this is not guaranteed.
So in conclusion, buy 3dfx!
Before you buy it, and I hope you haven't bought it yet, I want to make something aware to you: The 2900XT does not compete with the 8800GTX. It's only designed to compete with the 8800GTS, and even then, it trades blows. If the games are ports over from the XBox360, then you will likely find the performance on the 2900XT to be spectacular, as fundamental core differences between the Xenos chip found on the XBox360 and the R600 chip found on the 2900XT aren't too entirely different. The shader core, however, is a completely different story, as the 320 stream processors on the R600 are extremely complex, capable, and powerful.
But therein lies the problem. The R600 (2900XT) is a fantastic chip, but ATI may have overestimated their capabilities in the ability to drive it along. Certain functions have changed between the R600 and the R500 series. When Anti-Aliasing (AA) and Anisotropic-Filtering (AF) are not enabled on the R600, it is quite a speed demon. Once you start cranking those visual goodies up though, the performance begins to plummet. Since many of the unique filtering methods (Wide/Narrow Tent) are handled on the Stream processors, the performance may or may not be improved with future driver revisions depending on the driver team's ability to manage the thread dispatcher (the thingy that controls what exactly those stream processors are doing: Pixel, Vertex, Geometry, or filtering equations).
The bottom line is this: The 2900XT is sometimes slower, sometimes faster than the 8800GTS. It costs more than the 8800GTS. It exhausts more heat and consumes more power than the 8800GTX. It's not quite the debacle that the Nvidia FX series was, but in all honesty, as much as I love ATI cards, it's not quite the performance I was expecting this round.
Even still, it has a few things going for it:
-Console ports will probably run more smoothly using one.
-You can fold with it, and current performance is ~2.2x faster than current R580 speeds, though this ~2.2x performance level is NOT actually limited by the card itself. Supposed to be improved even more with time. Hey, some people like to fold!
-Driver improvement shows promise in boosting its performance. Still, this is not guaranteed.
So in conclusion, buy 3dfx!
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get the Q6600 and a cheaper but decent video card for now, as you will always be upgrading video cards
I myself will wait for the 2nd gen directX 10 cards. By then you will get 8800GTX performance at a much cheaper price
I myself will wait for the 2nd gen directX 10 cards. By then you will get 8800GTX performance at a much cheaper price
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Actually what I hope is that the OS will only have 64-bit memory addressing.
Having complete applications in 64-bit would tremendously decrease performance at the point where we are back at the Pentium 2 age again.
Since everything would have to be ^2 as big, you'd need AT LEAST ^2 memory bandwidth, ^2 data processing speed, ^2 databus bandwidth, ^2 harddisk bandwidth (and perhaps space for some aswell), etc.
The only good thing that 64-bit computing brings us, is the advantage of addressing more memory.
And that is already done by Intel, which has a 64-bit memory addressing technique called EM64T.
Of course, it's not enough yet.
A completely native 64-bit processor with 64-bits memory allocator, with native 32-bits computing and 32-bits applications is the best combination.
And neither Intel nor AMD have that. Yet.
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Well, it's almost standard on the off-the-shelf mainboards, and every new PCIe graphics card from nVidia/ATI is capable of doing this.
With the current setup he is buying, he can always get another HD 2900XT or whatever.
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Bah I hate Vista, sucks at games. Other than that it performs quite well, hope I'll be able to run MoH:A on max details.
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Will the OP post back and tell us what he thinks of his new graphics card and how his RO performance fairs?
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I'd had to re-download RO:O first, as RO:O is on my old HDD. Anyways, I got a weird problem. When I go into DxDiag, it says that my graphics card has 1755MB Ram?! I got the catalyst 7.6.
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Don't worry too much about what the dxdiag says. Mine says I have 1000MB of memory on my card, which isn't true.
It should have no impact on things.
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I was wondering if there are any games/apps vista 64bit does not support? because im thinking about switching from 32bit to 64bit.
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Actually, it seems as though stand alone video cards sometimes share system memory that you can see in DXDiag. I did not know this.
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Hmm!!! The question is : will my 32bit Works for Windows work on a 64bit Vista ?
Please answer if you can !
Tanks...
Please answer if you can !
Tanks
...
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