Page 2 - Should I upgrade my ATI Radeon X800-XT PE video card?

Stang,

I was hoping you'd stop by to weigh in on my most recent posts. Also, I'm happy to see your comparison tool is out in the public realm now. Actually, I had it saved in my Dev Hardward User CP (old mail) from when you had sent it before, and I used it quite often when preparing to purchase the HD 2600 XT. Unfortunately, I went on "half cocked" when I made my purchase in the sense that I had access to this wonderful comparison tool, but some of the specs/info was Greek to me...until I had time to research Google today.

I was hoping that the new card would run Battlefield 2 (1024 x 768) as proficiently as the X800XT PE, but I see the point you made about the older card being designed for optimum performance for games released during its release time. (Ugh...that would include BF2) As I mentioned in an earlier post, I don't plan to upgrade to Windows Vista, so the DirectX 10 capabilities of the new card aren't very important to me. At least for now.

All in all, I hope that the new card will run BF2 similar to the way the old card does. In the meantime I'm still looking at the option to upgrade to a PCIe platform within a year.

Thanks for the info!

i'd say it was not a good purchase...

Tiger direct is not the place to buy stuff. they have HUGE mark-ups on just about everything, including shipping.

i live in canada, so the price differences might vary. in any case, tigerdirect has the 2600xt agp for 100$ more than another competitor, canada computers.

in any case, video cards are now simple enough to understand.

Not sure if stand already mentionned this but..

a 2600xt is the higher end card of the mid range of the 2000 series. the x800 XT PE is the high end of the xX00 series. Amid range card of a series or two later will usually be slower or just about the same as a high end card of a series or two behind in terms of raw performance.

Thus a radeon 3650 will be slower than a radeon 2900. oh yes, the new hd 3k series? the second to last number, the 5 and 7 in 3870 and 3850 represents the pro and XT variants, 50 being pro and 70 being XT. that is AMD's way of removing the pro and xt and making life simpler.

Anyways, a X800 XT PE has one major disadvantage over newer card such as the 2600xt . It does not have Shader Model 3.0, meaning newer games requiring it wont display properly (such as bioshock - all i saw was wierd flame icons here and there at the start on my X800XL AIW AGP) or simply wont be shown in their full glory ( crysis looks like far cry on the x800xl agp, even when everything is set to max)

The downside is that the 2600xt doesnt have all that mch grunt, but since it is capable of SM3.0, will have more stuff to do on the higher settings, thus will probably be slower.....


As you may have noticed, i mentionned several times X800 XL AIW AGP. Just so you know, i had another system up till about two or three months ago, AMD 3800+x2 S939 @5400+, MSI K8N neo2 platinum, 3 gigs of ram, creative audigy 2 @ 4 and that video card. i had also considered going your path, getting a video card to hold me off until nehalem. then i considered pricing of the video cards and how much more the bridge chip added to the cost of agp video card for no gains. plus, my system having a NF3 chip and a dual core AND an agp card, it was not vista compatible. Nehalem, given AMD's situation, will probably be REALLY expensive. given the attractive prices of intel, and as stang mentionned, the insanely cheap prices of just about everything, i opted to buy a new system to hold me off another 4 years. i did end up spending about 800$ on upgrading motherboard, gpu, ram and cpu, but i know i will not need to upgrade the entire system for a while to come. Plus i am vista compatible.

Anyways, hope that helps. (AGP has no future, sadly)

Dragon-Fly:

Thanks for weighing in on the matter. You provided some interesting information which will prove useful to me in the VERY NEAR future.

Let me update my situation by providing information regarding the Radeon HD 2600 XT on the market. It seems that there are TWO distinct different versions of that exact model available:

"The second problem is that AMD there are two basic versions of Radeon HD 2600 XT, one using GDDR4 memories running at 2.2 GHz (1.1 GHz DDR) and another using GDDR3 memories running at 1.6 GHz (800 MHz DDR). And for Radeon HD 2400 they allow the manufacturer to set any clock rate they want. The problem is that the reference models we got for reviewing were running at the top clock speeds and other Radeon HD 2600 and HD 2400 boards you will find at the market may be running at lower clock rates and thus achieving a lower performance." (The full review can be found at http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/465/1)

As it turns out, the card which is scheduled to be delivered to me tomorrow is the lower end model. There is no way this card will even compare to the old Radeon X800XT PE. Again, I must mention that I could kick myself in the axx.

With that said, I think anyone considering a Radeon HD 2600 XT should take into consideration the apparent deceptive practice AMD/ATI is employing in the sale and distribution of this line of cards. It's hard enough for consumers (at least novice computer gamers) to compare hardware without having to worry about "variant" models of the same video card.

Anyway, I want to thank everyone for taking the time to respond to share your knowledge. I can honestly say that this lesson was well worth the $104.00 I spent on what I anticipate will be a dud card. And while I hold no allegiance to any particular GPU manufacturer, I can assure you that my next purchase will be NVIDIA!!!

i would not go for nvidia. nvidia has been an Ass to me too many times. last one they pulled on me was a failure to release drivers for my NF3 board to support vista. they had initially put a vista compatible sticker on the chipset on their website, then when people started saying it didnt work, immediately removed the sticker AND put the chipset in "legacy". That, i simply do not like and will not be buying any nvidia product in the near future and probably not for a long time to come.

on the video card end, yes, they perform nice in games. but when it comes to multimedia, ATI is king. does nvidia pass audio over HDMI? nope. Does ATI do it? yes. starting with the 2400pro ALL the way up to the 3870. does nvidia support h.264 and VC-1 decoding on their graphics card? Only on the latest card. what about ATI? Yes, on every single card between 2400pro and the 3870, EXCEPT the 2900 series which nobody in their right mind would buy.

In any case... Yes, people complain about ATI drivers. But people also complain about nvidia drivers... lol.

Anyways, i have owned many ATi cards and a few nvidia graphics card. i'll say taht i honestly prefer ati solutions. its not every single hour that you will be playing games and its always nice to be able to watch 1080p on your computer. also, ATI's offerings usually consume less power (exception made for the 2900 series - which, once again, nobody in their right mind would buy)

Currently i own a Radeon hd 3870 and am really happy i do. i had it working on my tv as well (using hdmi) and it feels really good to have everything passing over a single cable. plus the image was stunning.

I did notice that MOST HD 2600 XT (all variants) owners posted negative comments regarding driver support. In fact, many overall "positive" reviews made reference to lack of driver support, the need for a hotfix solution, etc.

My very first video card was an Nvidia GeForce Ti-500 (I believe that was the name of the card, but it was way back in 1998 so I can't be too sure anymore.) Then I owned a Radeon 9800XT and upgraded to the Radeon X800XT within a year. I had always been satisfied with the Radeons' performance, but the recent revelation of deceptive marketing (as I noted in my post above) chaps my buttocks to the point that I think I'll shy away from AMD/ATI in the future.

The HD 2600 XT will arrive tomorrow. Since I can't return it to Tiger Direct, I think I'll install it, try to find a driver solution, and bench test/play to determine the difference in comparison to my old card. If nothing else, at least I can provide additional information to other members on this board who may be contemplating this card and, like me, can't find much comprehensive information about it on the internet.

In retrospect, I wish I would have went with the 3850 as I initially intended. But stupid me, seeing the $104.00 price tag of the 2600...well, you know the rest of this story. And as the saying goes, you get what you pay for...

yeah... there are quite a few driver issues as far as i can tell for the cards with the pci-e bridge chip (meaning x1k to hd 3k)

I will say that i have had no problems with my 3870 pci-e flavor though. i am runing vista 64 bit sp1. I have heard of people having trouble with catalyst drivers on XP SP3 though. I am not surprised though, since XP SP3 is pure trouble to begin with.

This is very odd, considering...

I've installed the HIS HD 2600 XT without incident using the drivers on the VisionTek website. (I found this driver information from a recent owner/reviewer and for me this worked like a charm.)

Now here's the odd bit...

3DMark03 (1024X768)

Radeon X800XT PE = 12,443 3DMarks

Radeon HD 2600 XT = 12,933 3DMarks

For my next trick...

Battlefield 2 (1280X960, ALL SETTINGS HIGH, NO AA)

Radeon X800XT PE = 49 - 81 fps (intense battles, etc.) to 81 - 100 fps (flying over ocean or general landscape, etc.)

Radeon HD 2600 XT = 46 fps - 77 fps (intense battles, etc.) to 77 - 99 fps (flying over ocean or general landscapte, etc.)

While I plan to perform more testing/benching, I'm somewhat surprised the new card performs similar to the old card. Especially considering the grave difference in potential memory bandwidth.

Let's just see if this performance holds up...

memory bandwidth is not everything, just so you know. core differences and stuff like that are actually more important in my opinion than pure memory bandwidth. it is essentially saying the same thing as ddr2 1066mhz is faster than ddr2 800mhz. although this is sort of true, the front side bus limits BOTH memory at those clock speeds, so they will perform pretty much identically.

what i am trying to say is that more bandwidth from ram is still useless if you cannot ustilize it to it's full potential.

Its the same idea with people thinking ram means everything. they consider a 512mb card is faster than a 256mb card simply because it has more ram, even if the 512mb card is running on like ddr2 and the 256mb card is running on like gddr3.

oh yes and your X800 will score abysmally bad on 3dmark 05/06 whereas your 2600xt will score better simply because it supports more tests (due to SM3.0 support)

I've been using the HIS Radeon HD 2600 XT for over a week now and I thought I'd post an update on its performance.

First, I should mention that I overclocked my CPU so it is now running at 2.3Ghz. Using the ATI Catalyst Control Center, I have overclocked my GPU 860Mhz (core)/910 Mhz (memory).

Amazingly, my 3DMark03 score jumped from 12,101 to 14,539 - although it's a synthetic benchmark, it amazed me just the same. More importantly, I am able to run Battlefield 2 1280x1064 with all settings manually set to HIGH and 4x AA with smooth gaming. With these settings I'm able to achieve an average FPS of 56, with the minimum being 42 FPS. (It's just as Stang had mentioned in an earlier post - the 512 memory boost of the HD 2600 XT allows for increased "eye candy.")

Quite frankly, I'm surprised a graphics card priced under $100.00 is performing so well for my gaming needs. Incidentally, I see that the HIS model I purchased is no longer available. Also, I should note that I have not yet played any DirectX 10 titles, so I can't comment on its performance in that sense. But I suspect that this particular card will only prove a bargain for those looking to boost DirectX 9 applications.

Thanks again to everyone who provided advice and comments in this thread. With your guidance, I have learned a great deal about computers. I've spent countless hours researching different aspects of computer components, etc. I'm looking forward to building a new PCIe system within a year.

Mole

build it next year, after nehalem is out. nehalem should bring a big jump in performance which is becoming very interesting.

ATI has just recently launched the HD 4850, which frankly just amazes me. it provides performance equal to the 9800GTX and retails for about 200$ - a bargain compared to the 9800gtx's 340$.

This just makes me drool when i think about what will happen next. NVidia has launched gtx 280, but its just a card with a core 4x larger than the 8800gt, costs more than a 9800GX2 and doesnt perform as great as one (retails ~ 700$) ridiculous. oh, not to mention power consumption is through the roof.

ATI's offerings are very interesting to say the least. i have a 3870 and i am looking at the 4850 and going "that looks yummy". i probably wont buy one though.... hehe.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I had my eye on the 3870...I wish I had one, too...lol...

If there's one important lesson I've learned through my current video card upgrade it's this: BEFORE I EVEN BUY ONE COMPONENT FOR MY NEW BUILD, I WILL POST HERE AND SEEK + FOLL