Gfx card died , need advice on replacement

[kalniel]

:0 well you learn something new every day.

[BrynS]

If you're feeling adventurous, Tizz, you may be able to unlock the extra quad on your X850Pro (R480), assuming the quad is not defective. Places like techPowerUp! have numerous bios files that you could flash your card with, although I would research the option more carefully before doing any flashing -- also run the latest ATITool.

The X850Pro should be a substantial peformance improvment over your 9800Pro. I'm in a similar position at the moment, with a rather old AGP rig (Socket A 2400+XP, 1GB RAM) and my 9800Pro also died last week. I was intending to wait until the dust settles after the Conroe launch and the insuing AMD/Intel price war before moving over to a new PCI-e system. I still intend to wait, but have been looking for a cheap, temporary replacement with similar or slightly improved performance to keep me going until the end of the year.

Options I was considering included a new GeForce 6800XT/LE for about £80-90, with the hope of unlocking at least one quad and some vertex shaders, a second-hand X800XT for about £100 or a ~£90 X1600Pro 256MB. For those with higher spec AGP systems (3.6+GHz P4's, 2GB RAM, etc) it may be worth going for a 7600GS or the Gainward AGP card that comprises a 7900GT (G71), although I think most remaining AGP cards are overpriced and poor value, so it is a rather tricky situation.

I decided to go for features rather than performance and ordered an HIS X1600Pro 256MB, which should arrive on Tuesday. Performance-wise it's probably not great value for money, especially compared to a 7600GS/GT (an AGP version of the GT is apparently due fairly soon ) or a second X800XT, but I justify that to myself with the knowledge that my rig is very cpu limited and that I game (not as much as I used to anyway) most at 1024x768 with some AA & AF -- the X1600Pro (even with it's crippled memory bandwidth - 128bit 800MHz on the Pro versus 1.4GHz on the X1600XT) should suffice, plus I'm looking forward to playing with HQ AF and the AVIVO features and HD/H.264 decoding capabilities.

If ATI were to release an AGP version of their upcoming RV560/RV570 parts, they should make excellent AGP upgrades if priced reasonably based on speculated peformance attributes, but their PCI-e release is still aways off, September/October this year, with no AGP confirmation yet.

Cheers,


BrynS

[ibsnoozin]

Strange enough my 9800PRO also failed the smoke test when the fan died. After debating X1600PRO vs. X800GTO I opted for the X800GTO due to massive increase in pixel pipelies/engines (box says 12 tho coming out with all 16 unlocked) and mem bandwith (31GB X800 vs 13GB X1600). Yes, the Shader version is 2.0b rather than 3 however the performance of while being maxxed out rather than scaled back should override benifits of newer version.

[FrontSideBus]

Get an old 6800GT from ebay or something. Clock it to and beyond ultra speeds and bobs yous uncle! Mines allmost 2 years old and can still play anything to my liking.