I said it was similar not precisely the same, and my processor has a higher clock speed. His may be hyper threaded or something to make it faster than mine, despite the lower GHz rating. Besides that, I don't see what that has to do with much of anything.

I don't own either a x1550 Pro or a 2400 Pro, so I can't comment on the performance of either card, but I can recommend the x1550 Diamond Stealth model over all the rest, per it's 128-bit bus interface.

I do recommend upgrading your PSU if you want to seriously overclock whatever you get. With the 133mb/sec limitation of the PCI bus, you'll want to squeeze every last FPS out of your card that you can.

Teklord, what do you think the performence is like from the X1550 PRO compared to the 8500 GT?

I don't think there is a x1550 PRO, but you can go to this link 8500 GT PCI vs. x1550 PCI for a comparison. These cards are nothing compared to the same price PCI-express cards, but for playing older games, the 8500 GT definitely has the edge and you will notice a difference.

I mine from this link Advanced Data Systems on eBay for about $150 with shipping and VAT removed, make sure you request that VAT be removed if you order from overseas as it does not apply to Americans.

My computer is old and I thought taking the mobo out and replacing it might cause problems for the other components so I went with the 8500 GT for now. I really love to play Jedi Academy MP which has relatively low requirements, so this should suffice for that until I build my rig.

If you are willing to wait 2 weeks and pay $150 dollars, go for the 8500 GT, I can recommend no less for the antiquated PCI bus interface.

No, the game requires about 7 GB of hard drive space and right now i am cleaning out my hd, about to install a 120gb hd in a few days, so i will test it out as soon as i can.

Btw, a good PSU is always good. I am still using a 90Watts PSU and it still works perfecly, still blows out very cool air I have been using this PSU since 2002. But see Gateway products are always the best in my opinion, their stuff seems to last forever

Hey everyone, Maybe 11 and the 12 i am flying out to maryland to go to the computer show, and i might be able to get my hands on the 8500 GT or 7300 GT Geforce card. If they have it, or if they don't, they can special order the item in for me

Cross your friends. And btw, i think soon or later, the 8500 Or 7300 card might be out in the United States, but by then i won't need it, because soon i am buying a super computer , a secondary one with PCI-E slots. So the 2400 card is the last card that i will buy for this computer if i can find the 8500 GT.

peace

Tha General...

Well did you run TDU yet?

Did you run ATI Tool yet? [And what FPS did you get for the render]

Thanks,
Tim

No, because i haven't fix my hard drive yet. I will install the game on my external hd tomorrow, and let you know how it runs. And about ati tray tools, i will do that soon and let you know also tomorrow, late tomorrow alright.

But i did do something that made me get more fps in games, a big performance. I install the Diamond Stealth 8.3 Beta Drivers from their site on my Visiontek 2400 hd pro card, works perfectly.

So if you do get the Diamond Stealth 2400 hd pro version, make sure you download those drivers. Diamond Stealth Drivers are always the best

I was fixing another PC (HP) and I tried using driver detective which is one of those tools which shows you which drivers are out of date then offers to sell them to you. I ran it on my PCI 8500GT machine and it found 4 drivers out of date. One was the nVidia driver which is easy to fix, but I was intrigued that it also reported

Intel 82801 PCI bridge 244E out of date
fyi also

Intel 82801DV ULTRA ATA storage controller 24CB

I mention this as the 8500 and I *think* some of the ATi cards use a PCI bridge.

Intel's website is quite confusing, I assumed it would be easy to download these but it's actually not. Can anyone suggest an 'official' location to download these updated drivers from ?

Hey TL93, the game loads up, but the framerate is terrible. The sound cuts out, and the game drags big time, i'm getting lik 2-4 fps lolz. The game is just too powerful.
But see i don't think it has anything to do with my video card, if you look at my specs:

WindowsXP Home Edition SP2, Intel® Pentium III, 600MHZ, Sound Blaster Audigy SE Sound Card PCI card, 80GB Western Digital Internal HD, 500GB My Book Edition External HD, 512Megs of Ram, 90(Watts) PSU, Visiontek ATI Radeon 2400 HD Pro Edition 256MB DDR2 PCI edition

and the system requirements for the game:

CPU : Intel P4 @ 2.4 GHz or AMD Athlon 2800+. GPU (Video Cards) : ATI Radeon 9800 256MB VRAM or Nvidia 6600 GT with 256 MB of VRAM. Video Cards with vertex/pixel shaders 2.x and above are recommended. SPU (Sound Cards) : DirectX 9.0 compatible Sound Card. System Memory : 512 MB, 1 GB recommended Hard Disk free space: 8 GB DVD drive: 8x minimum DirectX 9.0C (included)

I think the 2400 HD PRO PCI card can run the game, but i'm using a PIII 600MHZ with only 512megs of Ram. Maybe if someone had a more powerful CPU, then i'm pretty sure it will run ok. But i cant run it.

Just got this message from the visiontek crew about more PCI cards:

" As far as I know, PCI version of video cards are still in the thoughts of our Product Engineers. I'm just not sure if we have any PCI version for the HD3000 series as of right now. We'll definitely post info once we have them. "

So who knows, we might see more PCI cards. I wouldn't mind keep buying pci cards , even when i buy my secondary computer. My secondary computer will be meant for the newer games anyway.

When I build my own PC with PCI-express 2.0 slots, I'm never looking back to PCI, unless I use it for sound or something. PCI-e slots are like 33 times faster than PCI. I can't do a mobo swap because I would have to reload Windows and I can't do that because it is stored on my factory hard disk, tucked away in a partition. Getting the 8500 GT was my best option for now and I don't regret it as a temporary solution.

BTW General, the 7300 was never released by Sparkle for PCI bus, so it's 8500 or nothing. If you really want the 8500 GT as a stop gap solution, just order it off the link in my post and save yourself a trip to the computer show. Make sure you request extra shipping shock absorption, because my 8500 GT barely had any and there are hashmarks in some of my Windows screens where I can see through the image to the one underneath. I believe this a result of the card taking some knocks en route.

Get PCI-e 2.0 General as opposed to regular PCI-express because 2.0 is two times faster over standard PCI-e slots and is the bleeding edge in video card technology. If TDU came out recently, there is no way I see that ever working on a system with PCI slots. HL2/Oblivion is the best you can hope for realistically with a PCI card, and only then with an 8500 GT and your system tweeked out to the max with maximum RAM allowable along with RAM, GPU and CPU OC'ed. That is unless you are content to play a slideshow and I've played my share of those with my onboard graphics.

Jives11, I downloaded some drivers from the Intel site for my Integrated Graphics on my mobo. Not sure what chipset that refers to, but perhaps if you download the graphics drivers for your mobo, that will be sufficient.

Teklord - If i were just replacing my components in my PC, i'd just go for the whole overhaul except the little things like the Accessories [DVD, Card Reader], Case and Hard Drive [200 GB SATAII is already good] since it would save me at least $250+ on a build.

That means i'd have to get a mATX motherboard which means if i want PCI-e 2.0, i'd have to turn to AMD with their new 790G Chipset [or something like that with onboard HD 3200]

Anyways, i'm just still in the middle of decision, not that i'm in a rush but if it comes to a overhaul, i'll just wait till the New year comes by =D

My post stated that a new mobo isn't feasible as I would need to re-install Windows and I can't do that because I would need to back it up on some media like CD or DVD or flash drive and I don't have a burner. I have to back it up because my copy of Windows is on my hard disk partition and there was no copy of Windows XP in physical form with my PC when bought. I think it is tucked away on a partition of my hard drive that is really hard to access, so mobo swap is looking tough right now. Plus something could go wrong with the reinstall and that would not be cool.

There are a lot of components I want to replace on my PC, practically the whole thing, so a brand new build from scratch is my goal one day. 8500 GT PCI is tiding me over in the GPU department until I can get the funds together for my economically based dream machine (sub $1000). Best of luck with your overhaul though as it is always exciting to upgrade the performance of one's PC.

Well I decided to see if upgrading any of the chipset drivers would improve my FPS. My dell uses the Intel 845G chipset and you can download a tool from the intel website which identifies which chipset you use.

the Intel download site is rather confusing and does not really have things called drivers, just .INF files which seem to tell XP how to configure drivers. Anyhow after downloading and running a number of things, all I managed to achieve was a 10% reduction in performance via either ATItool (FPS) or 3dmark03. I also tried the Intel Application AccelerIn the end I used the XP recover facility to time travel back to a few days ago before I started down this route. I couldn't see what I'd done wrong, but the Chipset drivers I started with seemed to give the best performance. It might be worth going down this route but enable system restore first

I noticed ATi Tool tends to be finicky and doesn't always have the same FPS results for the exact same settings on the exact same card, possibly due to temperature variances or other programs running in the background. So this means that it may not have been the updated files you got off the Intel site. IMO, you should reboot or turn off your system and let your video card cool off and try ATi Tool again for a 100% accurate comparison. This will probably not change much, but it will eliminate the possibility of other factors mitigating ATi Tool test results.

On another note, I am happy to report a dramatic increase in game performance with my 8500 GT over onboard. I went back and tried some games I played with my Intel Integrated Graphics in the past, and they ran incredibly well and I don't even have my sound card I ordered yet. I could barely run Half Life 1 on my machine in the past, but thanks to memory and video card upgrades, it runs perfectly with no stutter @ approximately 60 FPS I would guess. This may be underwhelming to some of you, but to me it is a significant leap forward and a good sign of future improvement.

I OC'ed my 8500 GT to 545 core clock - 900 Memory clock speeds over 459/800 factory settings, in ATi Tool. I noticed a huge improvement in performance in Star Wars Galaxies. Have to be conscious of temperature levels however as I have no internal cooling system apart from the fan or two that came with the system that is in there and the massive heat sink on the 8500 GT itself. I set the 8500 GT back to factory settings once I am done with my game session. Nice to see that PCI slots are not completely useless as many would have you believe and can run older games competently and efficiently.

What about Modern Games?

Well as I mentioned to you before, i can run CoD2 at Playable Frames at optimum Settings it sets which has Anti-Aliasing x4

You told me your machine ran CoD2 like a slideshow? How could that be possible?

My Video Card is crappier and it runs CoD2 without problems!

I ran 3DMark03 and it told me that my Sparkle nVidia 8500 GT has 512MB of video memory as opposed to the 256MB that Sparkle claims. Which is true? Can any 8500 GT PCI owners out there confirm my findings that they are showing the card to actually contain 512MB of memory as well? That would be a sweet bonus if the card really did have that much memory. Maybe someone out there can run a better diagnostics test of the card to determine the truth?

Hey TL93, good to see you online again. Circa 2005 games are about as modern as I personally care to expect any decent performance out of my machine. By decent, I mean the game running @ 60 FPS on full settings w/AA & AF. CoD2 demo did run like a slideshow and I expect the full game to be not much different. There are factors influencing this performance level however such as my not owning a sound card(hasn't arrived yet); GPU, CPU, & mem could be OC'ed as well, programs running in the background leeching memory, etc.

I'm glad you are getting better performance, but your PC is newer & better overall than mine as well according to what you told me and this is probably the reason CoD2 runs better on your machine. My machine probably can run newer games, but they will be slideshows and that is boring and frustrating to play, so I don't want to bother with that.

I got an Pny 6200 256MB pci card it rocks the house down, tried drivers, 81.95, 94.24, and the new one but they do not have heat indicator. I only got 512 ram can upgrade to 2GB of ram though.

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Thats a very interesting box compared to this one:


Nevertheless, i have 2 different versions of the 6200 cards. The evga sucked, and the BFG sucked, mostly due to the drivers. But looking at your System Specs, you should be able to run games just fine, much better then what i could do.

I never tried the PNY version, it might performed better then the rest.

Have fun and let us know how your games run. Infact, do you mind testing out Quake 4 and see how it runs?