This is a follow-up to my Radeon 9600 thread you can read here.
I thought I'd give the 5800 a try considering it's recent availablility at $229 shipped.
FYI, the rest of my system is a Barton CPU, Epox nForce2, 1GB dual-channel, clocked at XP 3200 with 200MHz FSB.
Here is my summary of the 5800.
This is a good performance card for the $, but it has a couple of shortcomings which I won't tolerate.
I'll summarize this into Pro's and Con's.
Pro's
Performance of this card is good. I've run quite a few games (mostly FPS) and I see no problem running 1280x1024x4AAx8AF on most anything thrown at it. This is with the card overclocked to 500/1000, which was stable. The memory topped out just a tad higher than that, I think I might of had a few 5-10% more on the core but I didn't want to push it. I found the performance to be superior to the Radeon 9600 (as expected) with or without AA or AF.
Drivers / Stability. The only thing that I noticed was bad performance on some nVidia demo's (Dusk and Last Chance Gas). All the games I ran on it worked fine. I was impressed with the performance.
IQ. No complaints here. I saw no abnormalities that bothered me. I've had a chance to see UT2003 on both the Radeon 9600 and the Geforce 5800 and I think the topic about the UT2003 trilinear texturing might be blown a bit out of proportion.
Con's
2D quality. Now that I've had some time to play with it, I don' think the 2D quality of this particular board is quite as good as the Radeon 9600. I would consider them equal up to 1280x1024x100, but the Radeon was better in text at 1600x1200.
Noise. Argh. I didn't want the fan to bother me but it does. It's the majority of my system noise when it spins up. If you have 6 6k delta's in your box you probably won't hear it but I paid some mind to noise levels when I put this rig together and I'm not satisfied with the dB's the 5800 cooling solution is adding. My system has a Vantec Truepower 400 PS, and a Aeroflow CPU fan and the 5800 is much louder that those.
My theory here is that one of the issues with this chip is a hot spot on the die with some DX9 functionality. Actually, I dunno exactly what, but some games cause this fan to kick in almost immediatly and some do not. When the fan kicks in, the chip is getting HOT. If you run it for a while and immediatly exit the game and check temps, the results can be suprising. I've seen >80C before, when it's typically 40C idle. The rise occurs in a matter of minutes. My belief is that there is a die problem with this chip which results in some crazy amount of heat when a specific chip function is used. Perhaps this is the reason they need the extravagent cooling solution matched up with the 2D and 3D clocking modes.
In reality, the temperatures don't bother me as long as the card functions properly, but I don't like it just the same.
So that is my $0.02. Hope someone gets something from this.
I thought I'd give the 5800 a try considering it's recent availablility at $229 shipped.
FYI, the rest of my system is a Barton CPU, Epox nForce2, 1GB dual-channel, clocked at XP 3200 with 200MHz FSB.
Here is my summary of the 5800.
This is a good performance card for the $, but it has a couple of shortcomings which I won't tolerate.
I'll summarize this into Pro's and Con's.
Pro's
Performance of this card is good. I've run quite a few games (mostly FPS) and I see no problem running 1280x1024x4AAx8AF on most anything thrown at it. This is with the card overclocked to 500/1000, which was stable. The memory topped out just a tad higher than that, I think I might of had a few 5-10% more on the core but I didn't want to push it. I found the performance to be superior to the Radeon 9600 (as expected) with or without AA or AF.
Drivers / Stability. The only thing that I noticed was bad performance on some nVidia demo's (Dusk and Last Chance Gas). All the games I ran on it worked fine. I was impressed with the performance.
IQ. No complaints here. I saw no abnormalities that bothered me. I've had a chance to see UT2003 on both the Radeon 9600 and the Geforce 5800 and I think the topic about the UT2003 trilinear texturing might be blown a bit out of proportion.
Con's
2D quality. Now that I've had some time to play with it, I don' think the 2D quality of this particular board is quite as good as the Radeon 9600. I would consider them equal up to 1280x1024x100, but the Radeon was better in text at 1600x1200.
Noise. Argh. I didn't want the fan to bother me but it does. It's the majority of my system noise when it spins up. If you have 6 6k delta's in your box you probably won't hear it but I paid some mind to noise levels when I put this rig together and I'm not satisfied with the dB's the 5800 cooling solution is adding. My system has a Vantec Truepower 400 PS, and a Aeroflow CPU fan and the 5800 is much louder that those.
My theory here is that one of the issues with this chip is a hot spot on the die with some DX9 functionality. Actually, I dunno exactly what, but some games cause this fan to kick in almost immediatly and some do not. When the fan kicks in, the chip is getting HOT. If you run it for a while and immediatly exit the game and check temps, the results can be suprising. I've seen >80C before, when it's typically 40C idle. The rise occurs in a matter of minutes. My belief is that there is a die problem with this chip which results in some crazy amount of heat when a specific chip function is used. Perhaps this is the reason they need the extravagent cooling solution matched up with the 2D and 3D clocking modes.
In reality, the temperatures don't bother me as long as the card functions properly, but I don't like it just the same.
So that is my $0.02. Hope someone gets something from this.
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