PCI Video cards

[Bateluer]

The cards I'm looking at are a Radeon 9250, Geforce FX 5500 and FX 5700LE. I was able to find some older benches of the cards, but none on current drivers.

As I said in the title, the card will be paired with a P3 933Mhz on a i810 chipset, with about 384MB of RAM. Obviously, it doesn't have to run Doom 3, but it does need to crush the i810 IGP.

Should be able to play WC3, Empire Earth 1, UT, Q3, and possibly UT2k3.

I'm leaning towards the Radeon 9250, but it lacks any DX9 support. The FX cards do have some DX9 support, however this is a P3 933 we are talking about, I doubt DX9 compatibility is even worth the effort.

Comments?

 

[SynthDude2001]

I'd probably go for the 9250...

 

[crazyeddie]

I scrounged up a 1Ghz T-Bird and Radeon 9200SE for my nephew, and it runs a lot of games surprisingly well. He plays UT2k4 on it and it runs well, he's only at 800x600 with medium detail, but it's smooth.

He also plays a lot of Diablo 2 and a couple of other titles.

9250 vs. 5200/5500/5700LE should be pretty comparable. From what I've heard, the lower end GF 5000 series cards can support DX9 lighting and shading effects, but they run so slowly on them that it isn't worth it.

Is the 9550 available as a PCI card?

 

[Bateluer]

Originally posted by: crazyeddie
I scrounged up a 1Ghz T-Bird and Radeon 9200SE for my nephew, and it runs a lot of games surprisingly well. He plays UT2k4 on it and it runs well, he's only at 800x600 with medium detail, but it's smooth.

He also plays a lot of Diablo 2 and a couple of other titles.

9250 vs. 5200/5500/5700LE should be pretty comparable. From what I've heard, the lower end GF 5000 series cards can support DX9 lighting and shading effects, but they run so slowly on them that it isn't worth it.

Is the 9550 available as a PCI card?

No, seems like just AGP.

I'll go with the 9250 then.

 

[I Saw OJ]

I would go with the 9250. My roomate is running the FX5700 in PCI with a P4 2.XX. And everything looks less than impressive. He plays alot of CS:S, it still looks like 1.6, and still runs poorly. Poor guy still thinks that it looks good...


seth

 

[housecat]

I throw 5200s in PCI only rigs.
Why? Cuz you get great Linux/64bit support for dinking around. And its DX9, hopefully it will do better accelerating Longhorn if its popped in a machine running that one day.

 

[Silversierra]

Get the 5700le, it's the best one. Definitely not the 9250 it's the worst of the 3, IMO. A 9550 performs similarly to a 5700le and a 9250 is worse than a 9550. The order would be 5700le, 5500, then 9250 from best to worst with the 9250 and 5500 being close. Keep in mind, you'll need to run low res. low detail to be playable in newer games.
http://www.tweaktown.com/document.php?dType=article&dId=649&dPage=6

 

[Bateluer]

I'm going to be paying for these upgrades out of my own pocket, in all likelihood. This machine will be demoted to the guest computer, after my roommate builds an A64 machine. I don't want to spend a lot of money doing this either.

Sapphire Radeon 9250 50 USD

Apollo Geforce FX 5700LE PCI 89 USD

I can't seem to find the memory bit size on the 9250 though it probably won't much of a difference when its placed in the P3 933Mhz machine.

 

[Bateluer]

Just checked the ATI compare page. The 9250 is really weak, compared to the 9200, and even looks weak compared to the old 7000! I don't want to spend a lot of money on these parts, however, the 5700LE looks like the best performer.

Anyone have links to these cards performing on the PCI interface?

 

[selfbuilt]

As this is just for a guest computer, you might want to try looking around for a second-hand PCI Radeon 9100 (same as the 8500LE). It should out-perform the 9250, and be a lot cheaper than a new 5700LE.

 

[Bateluer]

There aren't any PCI 9100s on eBay, but there are a number of cheap PCI 5500s. I should probably just go with the 5500, its only a guest machine and a P3 933 at that.

 

[Boobers]

I have that Apollo 5700LE. I like it very much. It comes clocked at 250/400, but some of them will OC to 450/500. Benchmark that! It even runs 3DMark2005 (it scored 281 on a 1Ghz machine).

 

[StrangerGuy]

If you want to buy a PCI 5700LE get the 256MB version which AFAIK has a 128-bit memory bus. The 128MB versions are the crippled 64-bit ones, so avoid them.

 

[kobymu]

just remember that a pci vdeo card WITH an active nic (10/100 and above) can easily chock u'r pci bandwidth

 

[Bateluer]

Originally posted by: kobymu
just remember that a pci vdeo card WITH an active nic (10/100 and above) can easily chock u'r pci bandwidth

The PCI Bus has a transfer peak of 133MB/s, right? How could the relatively small number of KB/s transfered per second effect performance in any significant manner? The card is already going to be a dog.

Edit - Its looking like the 256MB version of the Geforce FX 5500 is going to be the card. Should be able to leave his i810 IGP in the dust.