Wirehead Studios

Would it be cost effective to upgrade to a newer vid card, and which would be the best to get for the long run? :rolleyes:

depends on what you have right now... if you have a GeForce2 GTS or better, hold off...

1) the Radeon 9700 will drop in price when the GFFX comes out, so if $399 is a bit steep for you (MSRP on the GFFX), the 9700s should drop below the $300 mark, since they're already $329 at mwave.com (a very reliable reseller, have gold and platinum awards at resellerratings.com)

2) the GeForce FX would not be the card to get, based on the benchmarks i've seen so far...  it only outperforms the R9700 by about 5%-10% or so.... certainly not enough to warrant an extra $100  *see note at bottom

3) in correlation to #1,  GeForce 4 cards will drop in price too.  you should be able to snag a GF4Ti4600 for $250 or less... maybe they'll even hit the $200 mark.

* a lot of the performance issue may have to do with drivers.  obviously, nvidia hasn't had very long to optimize the detonators for the FX, so over the next few months after the FX's release, performance should steadily increase

Good idea... I'd stay away from ATI products personally, the last 3 I've had have caused serious conflicts within my systems. GeForces are always nice though ;)

The 9700 drivers are supposed to be pretty good...  not half-assed like the previous products.Lil - now would be a good time to switch to water cooling  :)

Either way, ATI's blew my support for quite a while... Although I am still using an old Rage Fury Pro in my server box ;)

any brushless DC motor fan you can pick up at a local computer store will work fine for your heatsink... just make sure the package says "brushless" or "bearing" on it... brush-type DC motors aren't as efficient and have a tendency to burn out quicker, but are cheaper because they are made from simpler components.  brushless motors use ball bearings to facilitate their movement which makes them much more efficient, but due to other design considerations (brushless motors actually require some simple electronics integrated into them to function properly) these motors are more expensive.  they also tend to last a lot longer because there is less friction and wear and tear on the moving parts.

Nah, he wants a 92mm Tornado.

looks like im the smartest guy on cooling.
I put my pc in a fridge on -20 degrees  :rolleyes:

anyway at this moment I would go for the radeon 9500 . its faster then any geforce 4 card even the new agp 8x series.
and you get more options on it like 2-4-6 times fsaa filtering . and a geforce 4 has a maximum of 2 times FSAA +you get much more fps it the same resolution then with a geforce 4 .

I would say I wait for the geforce FX (this is gonna be a awesomme card )
but the price will be over 500$ the first year and thats a little bit to much for a schoolboy who doesnt work like me to give for a videocard .

Im upgrading my system very soon now .
(15+ a sec here I com . :D )

I asked my wife if I could get one of those dorm fridges...  actually, for about $100 (USD) you can get one of those glass door wine chillers...  to put my water res in; the answer was a big no.  Seems that chilling the PC just isn't that important to her...  :(

I have a radeon 9500, all I did was get powerstripe and I overclocked it to be as fast as a 9700. Saved me a couple hundred bucks.

NOTE: The GeforceFX is faster than the radeon 9700.. Downside? it's got almost HALF the memory bandwidth...

nuh uh.  my trusty ti4400 has an 4XS FSAA option right in the menu dialog... supposed to be equivalent to 8X FSAA i think, with a performance hit more like 6X... now it's not terribly smart to turn it on when i'm running Q3 at 1600x1200, but then again, at 1600x1200 i don't need any antialiasing... 2X should be more than sufficient, and still playable :D

ummmmmm.... no?

1) the benchmarks aren't showing more than 5% or so increase over the radeon 9700, although this could be due to immature drivers...

2) nvidia is setting the MSRP at $399.  anyone charging you $500 or more is robbing you blind.

same story here... i got my GF4 Ti4400 when GF4's first hit the market back in april, saved over $100 vs. a Ti4600... then bumped it right up to match a Ti4600... runs quite happily, even in doom3  ;)

i haven't bothered testing it beyond 300MHz/600MHz, but i did it once before and i think i got 310MHz/630MHz, so i'll have to try it now that i've replaced the generic white goop under the heatsinks with Dow Corning 314 compound, and see if i can break the 325/650 barrier :D

Hm, overclocking vid...., i can do that...heh, not with out another cooling fan

I have 7 cooling fans in my box. Being the biggest one with the sweet Counter Strike fan cover\gaurd\grate ect.  :D

ive got a 9700 pro and i love it. i was allways afraid of ati drivers, but ive had no problems with these. they actually fixed a tuner conflict i had with the detonator drivers and my gf3. also from what ive heard the 9700 overclocks ok, although ive never tried it (had no reason too). anyway, thats what i know.

9500 is very cost effective, cheaper than a Ti4600 and a lot faster if you look around.

Sorry, think i will stick with what i know and trust.

PUT DOWN THE CRACK PIPE!!!!

[H]ard|OCP (http://www.hardocp.com/) benchmarked the Radeon 9500 Pro (difference between 9500 and 9500 pro is half the rendering pipelines and half the peak pixel fill rate), and it was neck and neck with the Ti4600 on most things, until you added antialiasing and anisotropic filtering, in which case the Radeon tended to pull ahead some.

However, I decided to benchmark my system against their 3dmark2001 results with 4xAA and 8xAF, and I actually scored higher than the Radeon 9500 Pro!  With an AMD Athlon XP2200+, 1GB PC2100 DDR SDRAM, a GeForce4 Ti4400 (overclocked to match a 4600) and a 45GB 5400rpm ATA/66 hard drive, I got 6537 3dmarks, versus 6350 from the Radeon.  Interestingly enough, i got a lower score with no AA/AF...  11185 3dmarks, while the Radeon 9500 Pro got 12092 3dmarks.  Of course if you look at the system specs, the rest of my hardware is slower than theirs:
P4 2.53GHz versus XP 2200+ (@ 1.8GHz)
PC1066 RDRAM versus PC2100 DDR SDRAM (yes PC2100 < PC1066)
5400rpm ATA/66 HD versus 7200rpm ATA/133 HD

and online, a Ti4400 costs just about as much as a 9500 Pro, and you get better drivers with the Ti4400  :D

keep in mind, i'm not an nvidia fanboy... i just call it like i see it, and right now i see that
Radeon 9500 Pro < o/ced GF4Ti4400 < o/ced GF4Ti4600 < Radeon 9700 Pro