Recommendations: ATI X800 GTO? ATI X800XT

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Sharkfood said:
What's more important is what was in the previous reply- getting your system, cpu, memory in-tune and performing to the extent a 533mhz bus P4 Northwood can. While it's already semi-crippled with single-channel, it's likely even moreso if you're not getting the full memory ratio or bandwidth single-channel can offer. SiS chipsets are notoriously bad for their need of tuning/mods to get decent power from them. It just takes work though. :)

Thanks for the reply again sharkfood. Alright I'm going to my buddies house to test out the card for defects and things like 3d preview not showing up...
About my system and cpu.. what can i do to make it more efficient and not bottle-neck the f*ck of out the x800 xt =)
i'm going to reformat soon so it is good timing :) also taking out my old school maxtor 120 gig hdd and throwing in a 200 gig 8mb cache maxtor hdd
give me some options or things i can do to stabilize or make my system perform to its full possible capacity :p still wish u lived in Vancouver BC
 
zazazoom said:
Alright I'm going to my buddies house to test out the card for defects and things like 3d preview not showing up...
Good deal. I'd expect the artifacting and purple-neon stuff to be gone on his system, else it may be a bum card.

As far as the 3d preview goes- it's a pretty common problem for a lot of folks with various solutions. Many an ATI card has been plagued with this yet performed perfectly in games (so people just disable it hehe).

About my system and cpu.. what can i do to make it more efficient and not bottle-neck the f*ck of out the x800 xt =)
Hit www.guru3d.com and their downloads section. Grab SiSoft Sandra. It's an excellent system benchmark. You can bench your CPU arithmetic functions, and memory bandwidth (it has tests for these) and report your results. From there, we can possibly help out with tuning.

i'm going to reformat soon so it is good timing :) also taking out my old school maxtor 120 gig hdd and throwing in a 200 gig 8mb cache maxtor hdd
Excellent. I'd imagine if you do a clean/full install, and provided you don't have a bum card, you're preview and purple thingie will go away (that is if your pal's PC doesn't exhibit the same.. but I'm betting it wont if he has a different. non-SiS system).

On the Maxtor 200gig... I've bought a LOT of these DiamondMax 200gig drives. Be sure formatted capacity is >185GIG. Many of their SATA and ATA133/100 models require you to use their cd software to get the full capacity, else you can only get 135-145 gig out of them. Don't ask me why, but 8 out of 10 new Maxtor's I've bought in the past 60 days report to the BIOS and Windows funky... have to partition them on the bootable CD that comes with them to get the full 200gig... else XP/BIOS will show them as 138gig or so.
 
So hmm..first off when I put my maxtor on boot from the cd it came with so it can format the full 200GIB and enable it? is that what u mean? >_< yeah i was reading reviews for it..but i got it on labour day in canada for a good price i couldn't turn down..otherwise i would've gotten a seagate 200GB
 
Nah, just boot off your normal XP setup disk.. and when it wants you to select/create a partition, look there to see how much space it will allow.

If it's 138-145gig, then you'll need to hit reset... pop in the Maxtor tool cd and partition it there.. THEN re-run the XP install and SELECT from the partitions you made previously from the Maxtor tools.

I'd always prefer normal, standard partitions over any special/custom partitioning tool usage... but in the case of SOME Maxtor's, they just have some funky proprietary thing that wont allow them to show all their space to the BIOS or Windows XP setup.

They are great drives though. I've setup several 200-250 gig Maxtor Diamondmax drives. While many needed the pain/special partitioning method using their cd software, they still remained FAST (135-150mb burst rates in HD Tach) and work flawlessly once partitioned that way.
 
hey is it good to partition my hard drive into just one big C drive? or should i kinda split 50 50 70 type of thing?
 
You'll find dozens of approaches to partitioning your drive space. Everyone has their own ideas of how to divide/organize their drives.

The one thing to keep in mind is fragmentation. Drives that do not get written/read to much are best to keep on their own partition so that way they aren't impacted by constant file deletes, creates and updates. For this reason, most people divide their applications from their system by creating partitions for these.

I do similarly. I usually create a C: partition big enough for My Documents, OS and various Documents And Settings folders for changing data for user(s) files.. then make a mammoth partition (D:) for games and applications to be installed. This way, I schedule defrag once a week for C: (browser cache and data that changes frequently), and maybe once a month for D: (game patches and the few games that still save to their game directory).

I just did similar for my GF's PC. She got a new 200 gig Maxtor Diamondmax. I made hers roughly 60 (C:) + 140 (D: for games/apps) and created scheduled tasks from above for defrag. It works well.
 
Alright, I've done a clean install and followed your instructions as directed. The 3d preview still isn't working. You've mentioned before that other people had this kind of problem. Some sort of compatibility issue? Anyway AGP write is OFF by default..Fast write is ON. Regarding the 3d Preview are you sure it isn't because the card could be faulty or retarded in anyway? :) Thanks again.
BTW: This new hdd I've installed is awesome. DiamondMax Buffer Size 8MB seek time 9ms 7200RPM.
 
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