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Help w/ PCI Card

P

pguidry

Junior Member
I'm trying to replace my built in graphics w/ a PCI card. I found some at newegg for about $50 that should do OK.

My question is they have 2 different 9200SE's available:

Chipset/Core Speed: ATI Radeon 9200SE/200MHz
Memory/Effective Speed: 128MB DDR/333MHz

or

Chipset/Core Speed: ATI RADEON 9200SE/200MHz
Memory/Effective Speed: 128MB DDR/400MHz

whats't the diff between the 333 and 400 effective speed?

I have 2 PC's at home and believe one of them has a 133MHz bus, does that mean I should get the 400MHz?

 
Well, both cards stink performance wise. The one with the 400mhz memory will be slightly faster.

The memory speed on the video card has absolutely nothing to do with the bus speed of your computer. Either of these cards will work, as will any PCI video card.

Let me look around at some video cards and try to find something better, although the pickings in PCI are slim these days.
 
See if you can find a Visiontek Xtasy 9100PCI card. It's much faster than the 9200SE. The 128MB one is usually around $70 and the 64MB one is usually around $50.

Here is one online retailer that claims to have both in stock.

Text
 
Alternately, the geforce fx 5700le's aren't too bad. I put one in my g/f's dell and it does the trick as long as you aren't trying to run high resolutions (> 1024x768). It also has the benefit of being directX 9 compatible and having better (i.e. newer) driver support. I have heard the old Radeon 9100s have some issues with modern games. Your other alternative is the fx 5600. I think Inno3d makes the PCI variant. Its probably a little faster than the 5700le by virtue of the 128 bit memory bus and faster clock speeds, but it doesn't have the new pixel and vertex redering unit of the 5700 series. Its also a bit more expensive. If you can manage to find a fx 5700le with a 128 bit memory bus, that would probably be the current holy grail of PCI cards, but the only one I could find in stock was the 256mb version (which was $150ish - more than twice the card that I got). On the cheaper side there are the fx 5500 and 5200. I would expect roughly comparable (and not so great) performance between the fx 5500, radeon 9200 and the higher end fx 5200s. Hope that helps.
 
The 9200SE has a 64bit memory bus, that's why it stinks. The 9100 has a 128bit memory bus and faster clock speeds. DX9 is not really a factor since none of the cards are fast enough to worry about using DX9 features. All of the cards mentioned are actually DX9 compatible and will have no problems with games requiring a DX9 compatible card.

I am unaware of any games requiring a DX9 hardware compliant card such as the latest video cards.

The radeon 8500 and 9100 still hold their own pretty well against the low end DX9 cards. Particularly the ones with low clock speeds and/or 64 bit memory.

Note that the 8500 and 9100 are also faster than the 9200 by virtue of being 4X2 instead of 4X1 architecture.
 
In terms of future-proofing I think DX9 compatibility is a nice thing to have. Especially if you plan on using that once Longhorn rolls around. Last i heard they are planning to do hardware rendering for Windows a la Apple's Quartz Extreme system or the Enlightenment WM for Linux.

I have also heard that certain elements of this system are already in place in Windows Media Center 2005 and that it requires a DX9 compliant card to work. Whether or not that requirement will carry over to Longhorn, I have no idea.
 
I have a VisionTek Xtasy 9100 PCI 128mb available for $70 if you are interested. It's retail boxed and is on nice jet black pcb and runs 295/250. Very quiet fan too.
Best pci card available ... even runs HL2 good.

My Heatware is in my signature
 
Thanks for the help. I've been looking for the 9100's and missed a couple of auctions on them. How did you find them at Hyper Microsystems? I did some searching but couldn't find them. Guess I need to improve my skills there.

I'll probably get them this week. I hope I'm not expecting too much, but from what I've heard, it will make a big difference over my current integrated graphics.

Thanks...
 
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