Video Card Upgrade

Vander · Post by **Vander** » Sat Oct 15, 2005 1:03 pm

I've been a little out of the video card races lately. I'm running an Athlon 2800+, 1gb RAM, Radeon 9700 Pro. My 9700 Pro has been a trooper for almost 3 years now, but I'd like to gain a little performance in BF2. I don't want to spend too much since this card will probably be junked when I make the move to PCI-E sometime in the future. I'm not ready to make such a move at this time.

So I'm looking at spending around $200 for an AGP video card. I'm looking for the greatest possible boost over my current 9700pro. I have no other requirements, like TV/DVI etc. I'd like to stick with ATI, but I'm not totally committed. I looked on Newegg, and they had an 256mb x800 GTO card for around $200.

Does anyone have any opinions on ~$200 video cards?

Thenior · Post by **Thenior** » Sat Oct 15, 2005 1:39 pm

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814102608

Vander · Post by **Vander** » Sat Oct 15, 2005 1:57 pm

Yeah, that's the one I found. Do you have any comments on it?

The next jump up is an x800 Pro for about $50 more. But if the performance difference between the x800 Pro and GTO is only a few percent, than I'd settle for the GTO. Does anyone know about this? I have never heard of an x800 GTO before.

Money! · Post by **Money!** » Sat Oct 15, 2005 10:07 pm

Well its gotta be cool because its a Pontiac...

And Thenior helped me out alot when I was buying a new card, he seems to know his stuff. If you guys both found the same card, go for it.

Mr. Perfect · Post by **Mr. Perfect** » Mon Oct 17, 2005 4:33 pm

The going theory is that GTOs are actually X850s that have been dumped to make room for the new cards, since all 16 pipes can usually be unlocked and generally will clock up to X850 XT speeds or higher.

If I remeber corectly, GTOs have 12 pipes active and 4 disabled, while GTO2s have all 16 pipes enabled. Seeing how the GTO2s have the same clock speed as an X800 XL, you'd still have a solid card even if you never put it up to X850 speeds.

Max_T · Post by **Max_T** » Mon Oct 17, 2005 4:52 pm

gto2 are pci-x. not sure if they make them in agp

Vander · Post by **Vander** » Mon Oct 17, 2005 5:21 pm

I ended up ordering an ATI X800XL for about $270. It was more than I wanted to spend, but what the hell. Hopefully this will push a full system upgrade farther into the future.

Anyways, I'm anxiously awaiting it's arrival.

Thanks folks.

Mobius · Post by **Mobius** » Mon Oct 17, 2005 6:50 pm

X800XL rocks. I got the passively cooled Gigabyte item.

I paid $540 for mine though.

woodchip · Post by **woodchip** » Tue Oct 18, 2005 6:43 pm

Vander let me know how the new card works as I have a system real close to yours (same vid card too)

Vander · Post by **Vander** » Tue Oct 18, 2005 8:32 pm

Wood, it's pretty badass. When I ordered it, I did some fps observations on my 9700 Pro so that I could do a little comparison.

3dmark05:

9700 - 2163
x800xl - 4753

In Battlefield 2 with the 9700, I was running at 1024x768, 2x AA, with all the ingame IQ settings on low. With the x800xl, I'm getting about the same framerate, but at 1200x900, 4x AA, 16x AF, and all the settings on medium. I tried high settings, and it was definitely playable, but I think I need 2gb of RAM to run that, as there was a noticable stutter when joining a map/going to a new area. (exactly like it was on low settings before I added 512mb) BF2 is pretty damn impressive graphically at medium settings and above.

woodchip · Post by **woodchip** » Wed Oct 19, 2005 6:33 am

Well, for 270.00, you got a pretty impressive performance boost.

LunchBox · Post by **LunchBox** » Thu Oct 20, 2005 6:11 am

If you goto High and have 1gig of RAM you will stutter when joining. The game uses like 98% of my ram when I join. Its worth it though. Everything I have read says that the sweet spot is 1.5Gigs.

I ended up buying a x800 pro VIVO. Flashed the 16 pipelines and then flashed it to a x800 Platinum Edition. Not bad for 252 shipped.