Hi there,

i think the 8400gs is very unfairly bashed on this board. Sure its slower than the 8500GT. Its a great card and if you look around hard enough you can find it real cheap. NewEgg is NOT the cheapest place to buy them from.

for example. Microcenter sell them for $29.99 (39.99 + 10 MIB). Thats a bargain for a series 8 PCI card with 512MB. You are gonna be paying another 50-60 dollars for the 8500GT.

Appaerently i cant post links yet but search for 8400gs on Microcenter.com and you will find it

very very happy with the card and the price i paid for it

How is the 8400GS unfairly bashed? It is a low-end card and is very suitable for HTPCs where gaming performance is not a concern. It is hardly a recommendable card for anything else.

my dimension 4600i has 3 pci and 1 agp slot. i'm new so i thought a pci video card would be better than an agp. now it looks like i can get an agp card to boost video over that of the motherboard one. any suggestions on a sensible agp card. i would hope it could support Vista VERO as well as some gaming. see my profile re my computer specs. thanks & i hope i've done this right

You have posted in the wrong thread mate. Post in the video card questions sticky in the Audio\Video sub-forums.

Hey guys, I know absolutely NOTHING about PCI video cards. I have a PCI express slot myself, and I don't worry about finding cards. So anyway, my brother has a Dell Dimension 3000 that used to be mine. It has PCI only, and he is currently using a FX5500 with 256mb and a 128bit bus. What is the best upgrade he could do for the video card? I have heard about the 8500gt, but cannot find it on newegg. I can find the 8400 however. How are they in comparison to the fx5500?

Mind telling his whole specs?

The 8500GT is 100 bucks at tigerdirect.

Now about the 8400GS, vs the FX5500. The 8400GS is better, but i heard a few folks playing wow and got worse performance compared to the FX5500. So i need to see your brother's full specs. Because some folks who are using the 8400GS PCI, is not having any trouble.

The specs are:
Pentium 4 3.0GHz with HT
1gb ddr 400(pc3200)

He does not play WoW, but if the 8500gt is a lot better than the 8400gs, I would rather get that. He plays Valve games and some Battlefield 2/2142. Both run on the lowest settings on his PC, but I cringe at how stable it runs. Could he bump up the settings with the 8500gt?

I would say buy the 8500GT. However, if he wants a cheaper card, buy one of the 8400GS cards and do some testing and if does not work out, take it back and buy the 8500GT. But if he has 100 dollars to spare, i say go for it.
The 8500GT i only hear good feedback from it. You said bump up, as in overclocking, well i wouldn't know. I don't like overclocking cards anymore, i just keep it at stock and it plays games just fine.

I am using a 6200 OC BFG , pretty good card. I plan to upgrade to the BFG version of the 8400GS.

There is also a 8600GT, a 9400GT, and 9500GT PCI, but they are not sold in the united states yet.

is there a site to import a 9500GT? And by bump up, I mean put the settings higher than Low.

I doubt it, i haven't found any sites which has the cards for sell overseas or over here in the united states yet.

http://www.sparkle.com.tw/News/SP949...PCI_LP_EN.html

http://www.sparkle.com.tw/index.asp

Website link , but again those cards just came out.

Well his computer is good, so the 8500GT might be his best shot. And you can pretty much max out games at high settings and get decent performance.

Tigerdirect has the 8400gs series and the 8500GT

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...561&CatId=1603
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...560&CatId=1603

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...142&CatId=1603

or newegg also .

What modern games (late 2007 and newer) can you max out on a 8500GT on the PCI-E bus at a respectable resolution (1280x1024 and above) ? Barely anything, if anything at all. With the limitation of the PCI bus, it is even less likely. The difference between the 8500GT PCI and the 8400GS PCI is not quite worth twice the price, since it is far less than 100% performance difference (around 20-25% in reality).

I too vote for the PCI 8500GT though I have tried quite a few. Check out the link in my signature, I have tweaked a Dimension 2350 which I think is very similar to the 3000

These are benchmarks using my wonderful BFG OC 6200 256MB DDR2 64bit PCI card, i also did some benchmarks using the 2400HD and 8400GS when i had XP using them. Note: I am using 90watts and a Intel Pentium III/600MHZ/800MB, and with the 6200 card i use the 81.98 drivers.
On my rig i can play games from the past, to late 2008, yes this year.

Doom III Ultra Settings AAX2 = 20-40fps
Quake 4 High Settings, AAX2 = 30-45fps
Prey Max Settings no AA = 30-60fps
Jericho Shader & Texture on High, 1024X768 = 15-26fps.
Fear Max Settings AAX2 = 29-60fps
Fear Extraction Point AAX2 = 20-55fps
F.E.A.R.: Perseus Mandate = Max Settings AAX4( Yes i put it on X4, just pushing my computer or 6200 = 24-65fps.
Crysis = 1024x768 , everything to low to medium = 10-25fps.
Code of honor 2 ( aug 2008 game ) Max Settings, AAX2 , 25-40fps.
COD4 - 1024x768, 1280x1024 normal to high settings, NO AA, 16-30fps.

.................................................. ...

Intel Penitum III/600mhz using When i was using XP home editon/Visiontek2400HD
, and 8400GS PCI PNY

Crysis tested with 8400GS PCI = 1280x1024 AAX2, low settings, but texture & shader on medium 20-30fps
Stranglehold ( Visiontek2400HD ) = 1280x1024 = 17-26fps max.
Timeshift (Visiontek2400HD ) 1024x768 low to best settings, HDR enable also = 29-50fps.

Limitation of the PCI bus? I disagree. They may not be as powerful as AGP or PCIE, but they get the job at decent settigns.

As I said - None of the modern (end of 2007 and beyond) games, with the exception of CoH2, are playable (Capable of getting a stable 25+ FPS on average) according to the information you just provided.

BTW, I call B.S on your Crysis results (And your CoD4 results). The VIA C7-D is more powerful than your P-III, and together with a massively overclocked Sparkle 8500GT 256MB DDR2 it is not capable of presenting anything near playable performance in Crysis, with an average of 16FPS in the early game and 6FPS in the tank battle "Onslaught" mission - and this is at 640X480 or 800X600. on the bare minimum of settings. In CoD4, the Cargo Ship mission (first in the game) has a max FPS of 24, and an average FPS of 11 (At 640X480, 800X600 or 1024X768 - Obvious CPU bottleneck).

I do not know how your came to those numbers - but they aren't even remotely correct. You are misleading plenty of people with those numbers, the reason for which I cannot comprehend.

Further reading, same benchmarks I showed you when I built that mini-rig in my sig:
Here

Addendum:
If you follow this link you will come across the performance of the 8500GT, coupled with a modern dual core CPU, on the PCI-E interconnect, in a multitude of titles. Crysis on High settings at 1280X1024, which you claim to run with 2XAA on a mix of low and medium settings gets 4.4FPS on average. Assuming switching to your settings increases performance four-fold, you still don't reach your claimed results. Since your CPU is a fraction of the power of a modern dual core CPU, a four time increase is unlikely.

Your numbers are wrong.

And other 2008 year games, depending on what game it is and what engine it uses, mostly budget 2008 games, but still 2008.

I have crysis the demo on my external hd, along with COD4, i plan to install COD4 again and i will benchmark using fraps and show you how well it performs at 1280x1024 normal to high settings, no AA. Crysis, i will play at 1024x768 low to medium, texture and water and shader on medium, everything else on low and i will show you that i get between 10-25fps. Actually crysis i don't have to use fraps, i can toggle the display info and show you.

These are the settings which i will use again:
http://img510.imageshack.us/my.php?image=crysis5ro6.jpg
http://img300.imageshack.us/my.php?i...scrysisqu9.jpg

I can only use AAX2 on my 6200 if i keep everything on low to 1024x768, so i will leave that off, and keep the other settings, low, medium to high.

You can view photos right here on another forum which i use to post on:
http://img154.imageshack.us/img154/5341/crysis3wz2.jpg
http://www.filecram.com/files/7y6.jpg



I am not wrong, i get between 10-25fps. I am not lying lol, i will show you soon. I plan to install crysis later, COD4, i will too and show you some benchmarks.

peace

These are benchmarks at 1024x768 low to high. The only way i get 10-25fps and the game is really really playable if i set it at 1024x768 low to medium, but i notice i can set it to low and keep shader on medium and post processing on medium and get 10-25.
So i am only getting 6-16fps at 1024x768 low to high.
http://www.filecram.com/files/Crysisbuild.jpg
http://www.filecram.com/files/Crysisbuild2.jpg
http://www.filecram.com/files/Crysisbuild3.jpg

So really with the 6200 card, on my Intel P3, at 1024x768 low to high its 6-16. 1024x768 low to medium and 1024x768 all low 10-25fps.
I use to get 20-30 with my 8400GS.

OK - very off topic, but looks like we could use a short vacation

Has anyone investigated using Solid state hard drives ? the reason I ask this question in this thread, is that we are all trying to squeeze as much performance out of old hardware and I wonder if this is a possible route ? I have seen the prices of these devices (IDE & SATA 2) solid state drives tumble. I read some reviews from 2006 where write performance was slower than conventional drives but this is porbably improved and the prices have tumbled (partly becuase of the ACER netbook devices which use them). It occured to me that a samll solid state drive would make an ideal page file or temporary file location IF write performance was better than normal drives.

A couple of drives were around $20 for 16Gb and they fit on a standard IDE connector though they are nowhere near as big as a normal drive. Possibly don't even need proper fixings

8500GT is the only way to go for your PCI only bus interface no matter what else you have in your PC because the GPU is completely separate from everything else. Until we can get the 8600GT or the 9500GT, this is all I can recommend and yes it is maybe 20%-25% as effective as the PCI-E version. You will get a few frames more over the 8400GS PCI but not a huge leap forward. Nonetheless, I wouldn't get the 8400GS regardless of the PCI limitations as you will want to squeeze every last FPS you can from your rig and anything less than the 8500GT will hinder you.

General's stats seem like a bit of a stretch to me considering I struggle with a lot of games on my P4 HT system and I don't believe I can play anything circa 2007 on max settings on this rig with 9500GT massively overclocked either. Retro gaming is my goal and if I can max Oblivion one day on this rig then I would be well pleased to be sure. You can't expect miracles with PCI bus type IMO.

Don't know much about solid state drives but external hard drives are a good value these days and I would like to invest in a terabyte version myself.

SSD drives which are faster or competitive in average transfer speed to regular HDDs cost an arm and a leg (and a kidney). What is worthwhile about SSDs (in all shapes and sizes, from full sized SSD drives to SD cards and USB sticks) is that they have extremely fast access times, which makes them good for swap file usage.

External storage is nice to have, I recently bought a Seagate FreeAgent 750GB and a Western Digital Passport 250GB and they work great. Just don't expect quick transfer rates - the slowest of my two RAID0 setups is around four times faster than the 750GB external HDD, and that one is faster than the 2.5" WD Passport (The other RAID is five times the avg. transfer rates of the 750GB Seagate). Both my external drives are USB2.0

As for Tha General's results, I already argued that point. If I get the time/motivation, I'll pull out the PCI8500GT from my HTPC and stick it into my main rig (E5200 @ 3.8Ghz) and run those benchmarks there to bury that issue once and for all.

Just a update. Using w2k is a very nice OS, performance in games are amazing now. My 6200 can handle crysis ok at low settings at 1024x768. But man, my Visiontek2400HD can handle the game much better. I get between 13-27fps at 1024x768 all medium settings, and the game moves very smooth. Also my temps stay at 39c - 44c after an hour of playing.

Timeshift with my 2400HD on my Intel Pentium III, using w2k 1024x768 medium to best(high settings) = 20-50fps.

And as i mention Crysis runs even better using my 2400HD at 1024x768 all medium settings.

Here is my PSU too: