Originally posted by: mwmorph
really? fastwrites are off by default in bios right now because everyone i've talked to says fastwrites are detrimental to stability with almost no performance gain.
In games yes, for smooth HD playback it can be a big performance factor. When we had all those borked nv40 PVP discussions and did testing, some, including myself, discovered that FW off meant lots of dropped frames, on there were very few. We also found most AMD systems neeeded to hit approx. 2.3ghz to give fairly smooth WMVHD 1080p playback in the Step into Liquid trailer. With FW on you shouldn't dropped more than a couple of frames with the rig you have.
if i get the 6200pci, how well will it play with my 9800xt?
Who knows? but you could always set a restore point, mirror on another HDD for safety, ect. and give it a go. I really don't think it'll come to that with FW on though, you should get smooth enough playback to avoid needing a new card. H.264 1080 might still be lackluster though, and the X1600 series isn't promoted as capable of accelerating H.264 1080p, and neither is that 6200. You'd need to go AGP 6600GT or better from nV for that, plus still have gaming performance similar to your card. You could probably get $70 or so from your card and find a used 6600GT for $100 or so, and solve all your decode problems
if the 85 drivers ever get here and live up to nV's claims about H.264 acceleration!