Anyone with Radeon 9700 and a 1ghz CPU?

[silentScope]

Anyone out there have a Radeon 9700 and a 1ghz or around that CPU ? I'm thinking of buying it but I'm not sure if it will do justice. IS it a waste of money? Or will it be smooth and stuff? Esp for UT 2003.

 

[AnAndAustin]

Well it would make a LOT more sense to upgrade the CPU and settle for a GF4TI card. At 1ghz you won't really get the full potential out of a GF3 or Rad8500 let alone a GF4TI or Rad9700. The main benefit Rad9700 would bring would be the ability to play with AA and Aniso maxed out and virtually no hit in FPS ... plus you should find there is little diff in FPS when upping the res. The same would prob be true for a GF4TI4200 on a 1ghz CPU though, it would really be much better to get your CPU sorted as quickly as possible as it certainly will be holding back the Rad9700.

 

[AnAndAustin]

It posted twice, don't know why, but I edited it and might as well use this space to post you the CPU scaling articles so you can see how most gfx cards (unfort not Rad9700) vary in perf with diff CPU speeds.

AnAndTech many games

AnAndTech UT2003

 

[Smilin]

You're going to find this:

You can run at a medium res (say 1024x768) with AA, AF and some other settings cranked all the way up and it will look great. Your framerate will be good but not stellar. Just tweak carefully to make up for a slower CPU (turn down marks on walls, physics & geometric detail, ejecting brass etc). Keep vid-card bound settings turned up (Texture detail, trilinear filtering etc). Basically it's going to look REALLY good at a medium framerate...tomorrows games anyway. Quake III is obviously going to run just fine.

That Radeon will scale well up to about 1.8 Ghz and then flatten out. With this in mind realize that a 9700 is about the same cost as a GF4 4600+Athlon XP 2000 CPU.

I'm using a 9700 on a 1.33Ghz machine and I can definately feel the bottleneck in the CPU. I'm getting a Athlon 2400 in a few days...if I remember I'll come back here and post the difference.

 

[alkemyst]

Unfortunately at 1GHz you are limited to inferior cards compared to the 9700....you would be much better value out of upgrading your CPU than going to the supreme 9700...

Fortunately that upgrade is relatively cheap. The Tualatins are a great buy, I purchased a 1.1A and got 1.42GHz out of it for under $100.

The 9700 is the Rolls Royce of video cards right now....you will hear a lot with them on these forums but in reality game programmers are writing for the lesser cards still.

Upgrade that CPU now then go with a new vid card when it starts dropping frames in your favorite games.

 

[Snooper]

This discussion sounds just like the discusions about the Voodoo 2 when it first came out: can I run it on a slower computer??? And you got the same "you are limited to slower video cards with that slow of a CPU" comments. I bought one (my first $300 video card. But not my last...). The maxed out V2 w/12Megs of ram and installed it in my P166 (that was one of the slow computers at the time...). The results? It flat out KILLED anything else out on the market at the time. Would it have run faster if I had a faster CPU? Yes. Could I have gotten better performance with my slow CPU with a lesser video card? No way in hades! And it was very nice when I upgraded to a 266 Covington OCed to 412Mhz!

So, if you can't afford to buy a top'o'the'line video card AND CPU at this time, figure out which one is hurting you the most. Is you CPU waiting on the video card? If so, buy the 9700 knowing it will be waiting on the CPU until you upgrade that component at a later date. Of course, if your current video card is already waiting on the CPU, then you will gain less if you upgrade the video card without upgrading the CPU first. In that case, pick up that latest greatest CPU and then upgrade the video card when you can afford it. And if you do upgrade the video card first, it's nice to know that when you do stick a hotter CPU in the box, it will get a very nice boost with the faster CPU as well.

 

[Torghn]

You would be better off upgrading yoru CPU first, however if you plan on upgrading fairly soon anyway, I'd go with the Radeon 9700. Crank up all the featuers, and when you do upgrade your CPU you'll have an excellent video card to go with it.

 

[jiffylube1024]

I think paying $300+ for a Radeon 9700 with a 1GHz CPU (and no intention to upgrade the CPU in the short term) is very shortsighted, and a waste of money. As Austin said above, why buy a $300 Radeon 9700 when a <$100 Radeon 8500 will perform EXACTLY the same on your CPU? I over-emphasize a bit (you can up the AA and Anisotropic filtering a bit more with the 9700), but you won't get any higher framerates really with one or the other. You can spend $300 buying a new motherboard, CPU, and even DDR memory and a Radeon 8500 or GF3 and get MUCH better performance!

 

[nemesismk2]

Using a R9700 with a 1ghz cpu would be a complete waste of money, why purchase such an expensive video card and then limit it's performance?

 

[Skibby9]

I wouldn't consider this a waste... I am running my new 9700 PRo with a TBird @ 1.33GHz with PC-133 Ram., having upgraded from an 8500. Framerates are improved (of course) that were fine before. The real reason I got the 9700 is that now I can run everything with 6x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering with no noticeable performance drop from the 8500. Just now everything looks so much better. I for one was really disappointed that although framerates and basic image quality were great, you still had to deal with the jagged edges unless you didn't mind a slideshow. Furthermore, apparently the 8500 is flawed in that you couldn't use trilinear and aniso filtering at the same time.

Besides, it is not as if I don't have plans to upgrade my mobo+ram+cpu eventually anyways...

If you really want to justify purchasing the 9700, just take a look at Anand's benchmarks and consider the prices-- the 9700 just smokes the 4600 for not a whole lot more. To me, the best bang for the buck is still the 8500 (lower end), and definitely the 9700 Pro for the higher end.

 

[Serp86]

Well, i just got a 9700 and have a p3 1ghz myself. I know i would have been better off upgrading but my father went to merica, and as prices there are cheaper then europe, i told him to get me something. Now, you all know that a motherboard is too big to carry in a case, so i told him to get a radeon.

Now, i got the radeon 4 free and have nearly enough spare money to upgrade to a 2100+. Smart eh?