Whats is better, a Radeon PCI card or Geforce 2 or 4 MX PCI card?

[DarkKnight]

When chipset performs better in PCI mode? I haven't found many benchmarks comparing a PCI Radeon card (like Radeon 7000 DDR PCI) with a PCI Geforce 2 or 4 (like the Geforce 4 MX420). Also, does DDR memory make much difference in PCI cards?

 

[drogue]

i havent bothered with any math, but i think that ddr memory would more than saturate the standard pci bus, so i dont think ddr is a big issue here.
the bigger issue, is why use a pci card to begin with? you obviously have an agp4x board, and the geforce2 gts-v is prolly the nicest of the bunch you picked, unless you snag a gf4mx460, i thought the 440 was supposed to compare almost exactly to a geforce 2 gts.
if you're looking to buy for an older computer, i'd recommend a geforce 2 as its more likely to be compatible with the other hardware. difficult to make a really good recommendation though.

 

[hans007]

the radeon 7000 is a raden ve. it would likely be a lot slower than either the gf2 mx and much slower than the 4mx.

now if you had a radeon 7200 or 7500, then maybe you could beat out the gf2mx, and if it was a pci 7500 you could probably beat a mx420 and be about neck and neck with an mx440 pci if they make those.

 

[AnAndAustin]

😉 Well for these lower end cards, PCI doesn't hit perf vary much (5-10% tops) and as such any AGP comparisons are still applicable.

😀 GF4MX cards are VERY equivilent to GF2 cards (that's all they really are, tweaked GF2 cards). In basic 3D perf it goes like this; GF4MX420=GF2MX400, GF4MX440=GF2TI, GF4MX460=slightly faster than GF2ultra (but WAY slower than GF3TI200). The GF4MX cards do offer MUCH better AA, '2D' image quality, dual display, DVD playback and TVout (only slightly better). The RadVE is way slower than even a GF2MX200 while the Rad7500 can easily take on the GF2TI. Radeon cards compared to GF2 cards do offer better '2D' image quality, dual display, DVD playback and TVout. So essentially, expect to pay over the odds for a PCI card, but perf will be decent on a slower CPU (500mhz) as faster gfx cards won't really make much diff anyway. If you can get a 64MB PCI gfx card, 32MB is very limiting AND this is hugely important for PCI gfx cards. Other than that see what the price and availability is like, and do consider ditching the mobo for one which offers an AGP2.0 slot.

 

[Engr62]

The only Radeon PCI video card I have experience with is the Radeon 32 Mb SDR PCI (the original Radeon PCI before the 7xxx series). This card has the full Rage6C core unlike the 7000 or the original Radeon VE.

I purchased this card a while back based on this review. The performance of the Radeon SDR seemed to be adequate for me based on the review, so I purchased a PCI version of the card (at the time, I was using it on an old socket 7 mb that had an AGP slot that wasn't always compatible with the AGP cards I had tried--a Voodoo3 worked but an ATI Rage Turbo didn't). Unfortunately, the performance of the PCI version was nowhere near that of the AGP version in the review.

Here are a few benchmark numbers from tests I ran when I had the Radeon 32 Mb SDR PCI card.


Quake 3 Test v. 1.11 (Demo001) -- Maximum detail, trilinear filtering enabled:

Pentium 3--933 Mhz, 256 Mb PC133 (not CAS2)
640x480x32 = 54 fps
800x600x32 = 46 fps
1024x768x32 = 36 fps
1280x1024x32 = 27 fps


3D Mark 2000 v. 1.1

Pentium 3--933 Mhz, 256 Mb PC133 (not CAS2)
640x480x32 = 4316
800x600x32 = 3459
1024x768x32 = 2577


In the article I mentioned previously, the Quake 3 performance for the AGP version of the card was 121 fps and 61 fps for 640x480x32 and 1024x768x32, respectively (on an Athlon 1.1 GHz machine). They also presented the framerates for Quake 3 on several other processors--my 933 MHz P3 should be between the 800EB (112 fps at 640x480x32) and the 1 GHz (119 fps at 640x480x32) if the PCI version could perform close to the AGP version, but I'm at less than half of their performance (54 fps at 640x480x32). I looked around, but I never could find any published benchmarks of the PCI version of this card with which to compare my results.

Now, the 2D quality and the DVD playback performance were very good with this card; however, you may want to look elsewhere for 3D performance.