EuroHarmony Community Forums
Archive => EuroHarmony VA => Old Forum => Technical discussions => Topic started by: EHM-1838 Andrew on July 20, 2006, 08:16:47 pm
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Good grief its a graphics card question DUCK!
Iam thinking of upgrading my graphics card(my present is a Radion 9200 which came with the machine i don't really have any complaints it seems performs well considering you can probably get it for about twenty quid)BUT! iam thinking ahead to FSX and maybe something a little better,i cant afford a really expensive card so the fx6200 seems reasonably well priced but is it any good are you using one?
cheers Andy
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For not too much more cash you can get the FX6600 card which is very good
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6200's are nice cards, whats the memory on the thing?
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Thats just what i was starting to wonder ;)
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Andy,
Are you using AGP or PCI-E? Here are a couple of choices from me in the not too expensive ranges:
AGP: Sapphire X1300 256MB - £64.57 inc VAT
PCI-E: Asus ATI Radeon EAX-X1600 Pro-TD 256MB - £71.62 inc VAT
As you can see, the PCI card is a bit more expensive, that is because its a far better card. The equivelant PCI version of that AGP card comes in at about £42 so you may also want to consider changing over to PCI-E motherboard when you get some spare cash. (Of course that is if you don't already have one!)
I prefer the ATI cards myself although for FS2004 there is not a lot to choose in the performance difference between manufacturers. By the way, both of these prices were from www.overclockers.co.uk a cheap mail order component supplier. Have a look at "This Weeks Offers" as they often have some great deals on GPU's.
With regards to the cards above, it is my opinion that you will not get a good enough performance from either of the above cards to run FSX satisfactorily at high settings. I had an old X850 and although it is a great card, it struggles with FS2004 at full detail. (This is a similar card to the X1600)
Hope my opinions help.
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Phil,
As you seem to know what's hot and what's not in this arena (and I'm not very current on hardware :P ), do you know anything about the GeForce 6600LE (I'm pretty sure that's it...) which is 'on sale' in PC World all over the place for about 70 quid? I'm thinking of upgrading my GeForce4 MX440 card and I'm looking for a relatively inexpensive AGP card... How does this one compare to the Sapphire you mention above??
Is it another overpriced turkey from the big name stores???
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Dom,
I am not too good with Nvidia Stuff, but from the tech specs I guess the Geforce 6600 range and the ATI X1300 range are pretty similar. The Geforce 6800 and X1600 are pretty similar. In some games the ATI cards are better and in some the Geforce cards outperform. Have a look around at http://www.hardwaresecrets.com and look for reviews of the cards you are looking at, that should help you out a bit. One thing to remember, the ATI cards are newer models so there is no real direct comparison.
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Phil,
Thanks for your swift reply mate - I'll do a bit of research on that website before I get my cash out... :P
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I have a nVidia GeForce 6800 GT and it is very good in my opinion ...
The FS frame rate is awsome and it's not very expensive.
Regards,
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@Dom: NO! No, no, no, no... (any more required?)
Avoid the LE cards as unto the plague. Think in terms of the difference between Pentium and Celeron...
If you're running AGP still (me too...) I can heartily recommend the GeForce 6800 GTX (the cut down GT, which is a cut down Ultra. You seem to know nVidia well enough that that progression should make sense...) They have good enough performance to keep FS2004 happy enough, and they shouldn't be all that expensive now (got mine a year ago when they were still over £100)
@All: I guess a lot of us are beginning to look at new hardware in advance of Vista/FSX. My feelings (as an AMD/nVidia advocate) are that you want to be thinking in terms of a PCI-E mobo with as new a socket as you can justify and SLI/Crossfire capable (I'm looking at AM2, nForce 590 chipset, almost certainly SLI capable - you Intel and/or ATI folks have similar hardware...) *BUT* until Vista ships there's very little point in populating a high-end mobo with a really big CPU (dual-core) and SLI GFX cards as very little is capable of pushing such things to their limits, plus it's piggin expensive to do this. I'm thinking in terms of "planned migration" as part of my on-going sim-pit project - my current big PC will get upgraded and "demoted" to running just FS in my sim-pit and I'll get a new laptop for my day-to-day computing.
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Bruno & Murray,
Thanks for your advice, especially the NO's about the LE card Murray ;D
I'll check out the 6800GTX and start counting what's in the piggy bank !!
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I think it sounds a good idea to play it cool. I have seen somewhere that there are a chance that some of might never see Windows Vista. There are some talk, that the EU might not allow Microsoft to send Vista on the market in the countrys that are members of the EU.
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Hello guys
I did post a reply thanking you for your time and advice.Unfortunatly that post seems to have been removed for some reason,so once again thanks for your thoughts.
cheers Andy