Geforce cards

ThrAx

I bought it here in Singapore, that price includes vat or whatever they call it over here. So excluding vat it would be even cheaper.

Quigs Snr

'I was thinking you should be hitting more like the 5-6500 mark at best myself'


I have yet to see any Geforce 2 based card get far above 5000, no matter what processor (even on an XP2100). The sad fact of the matter is that, the GF2 Ultra in question, is being well served by either your P3 1GHz or your top of the range P4/Athlon, sure the more powerful machine will be faster, but not by too much. This is because (over simplification alert), a P3 450 and GF2 will scale very nicely up to a P3 1GHZ giving a large performance boost, however at the PS 1Ghz (Athlon 900 etc....) the GF2 is getting close to the amount it can be fed from a CPU, and speeds far in excess of this do not yield the same returns (although you will notice smaller increases).

A lot hinges on your motherboard too by the way as far as 3DMark is concerned. I had a shuttle ak32 board in my machine for testing for a day or 2 (all other components unchanged) and noticed a drop of 400 on 3DMark.

Fidelis

I installed that agp program for my mobo and ran 3DMark again. I got 4866 points this time around on the same settings - that's an increase of 613, not bad eh?

I then reset the resolution to 640x480, kept the other settings and got 5735 points

Quigs Snr

Thats great, more like it. I think you are operating fine now.

po0k

Originally posted by tactical anni
hmmm I was thinking you should be hitting more like the 5-6500 mark at best myself.......

On my gf2 gts pro 64mb ddr at stock speeds on a pIII 1.0Ghz I was getting 4455 or there abouts.

I'd go messing with your agp aperture size and benchmark after every change.

Disable all caching (apart from l1 and l2 cache) in the bios
Disable all video bios shadowing and video caching as well.
You could disable ecc checking on the cpu for a wee boost too

What dets version were you using for this?
and what res, bpp, 3dmark version etc.?

Doodee

With reference to Doodee's post "Witht he next quarter in Fall the prices of the current N-vidia cards will fall" - unfortunately this is not true in the Irish market, as the previous generation high end (Ti) cards do not seem to drop in price but just get replaced by the new generation. <And the old 1's get sold at full price to the foolish>. If anyone knows somewhere that sells these cards (e.g: Vanilla GF3, GF3 Ti 500) off cheaper than Euro 250 then let me know cause I wan 1 :!)

HeHe, prices dont fall in peats, thats why I had Mr.Peats staying in our Hotel playing late night High stakes poker. Infact, For their video card pricing peats are of the worst, fact is that the GF4 Ti4200 is ment to be in the Sub $200 market, and the Euro is currently worth more than the dollar, and also teh Ti range fell dramatically after the release of the GF4's (GF3 Ti's that is). I saw a price drop of almost €70 on similar cards.

Komplett are a norwegian or scandinavian company who have a warehouse in dublin (maybe a sales office...I dont know) they do over-night delivery and if the items in stock you will recieve it within 48Hrs (Unfortunatly for me my 120Gb wasnt and so its another 4 days wait)

If you can buy trade then u can pick up a lurvly Radeon 8500LE 128MB wiv DVI-out for €120, or likewise a GF4 Ti4200 for €115, thats including VAT but excludes the delivery cost,

dont get me wrong, peats are better than Compustore...alot better...but they are no where near the cheapest in Ireland, dont forget Marx-computers or itdirect Dawn and a few others, who all do great deals sometimes...

as for me...u cant beat the Scottish IT stores. got a DVD-Burner for Sub €450 including VAt and delivery when DVD-Burners where at a price of €600...or in peats for the exact same burner a nasty €700....

as reguards the R300, just check out Anandtech.com or rage3d for more news on it. I still dont know the exact release date..
also..if you are buying a new card...dont forget that the new Kyro cards shouldnt be tooo far away, and with T&L (Hardware) and Tile based rendering, they appear to be sweet (on paper...but then again...look at matrox and the parhellia)

my 2 cents

just noticed this now

By the way, with Radeon, avoid VE and LE branded cards, they tend to be castrated, much like NVIDIA and their MX cards.

the VE cards might be casterated, but the sole perpose of this is to lower the pirce.
As for the LE cards, only difference is the clockspeed and Ram used, nothing else is changed from the original card, chip and everything is the same.

justhalf, well sorry that i dont Quote John Carmac word for word :P
yes, clock pass chads.......

ThrAx

what the fuck are clock pass chads. I hope you can eat them they sound tasty, like that popcorn chicken at KFC but i dont think u get any hardware t&l with the popcorn chicken. I know, i'll ask next time im in KFC and report back.

Slutmonkey57b

Back to the original point, you might be surpised at the speed boost you can get in a game by fiddling with other stuff - I find that turning down sound settings gives me quite a boost in most games, running on a similar gammy spec system. Just because you're getting low FPS doesn't necessarily mean your graphics card is the bottleneck.