Gone to the dark side
LOOOOOng time no posted... Haven't been into hardware that much since mayish but now I've gone to the dark side and gotten an ati card O_O A x1950 pro since the 7600gt was starting to feel slow in several new games and since I now have a job so I can actually afford to upgrade more than every 2 years...
So far I'm very happy with the card. It has the arctic cooling accelero cooler installed by default, it's insanely silent. More silent than the silent thermalright v1 I had on my 7600gt and I had a 19db fan on that. It's also very good at cooling, core stays at around 50 during load. And I've found out that most x1950 pro cards has 3rd party coolers :D Very good since they usually cool better and are more silent than original ones. Tv quality seems to be better on the new ati card for some reason though I miss the auto maximize videos on the second installed screen. Have no idea if ati has that or not since ccc aka. catalyst control center doesn't work for me. So I can't change ANY settings like AA or such stuff. Luckily it can be done inside newer games. Can't really overclock the card either since there isn't really any support for the card in 3rd party oc progs. In most programs the computer just crash if one does ANY change on the core/memory speed.
Ati traytools party works atleast, one can overclock the core but the memory is read wrong so that's not overclockable. I managed to get the core up to about 640-650 before it crashed. But I didn't look that closely since I had it on automatic overclocking. So less than 10% overclockability on the core. Have no idea about memory but from what I've heard it's not that overclockable either. Hopefully there will also be software vmodding on this card so I'll be able to oc to atleast 700 Mhz. But the ones that have hardware vmodded the x1950 pro cards say the volt regulators get very hot when vmodding even a little and apparently they are also a bit hard to cool.
Remember, a graphics card can never be too fast so one NEEDS to overclock it ;)And in my oppinion anything less than a 10% oc isn't even a tiny bit impressive. 20% is where it should be and 30% is good. Over that it pretty much rocks. Oh, guess I should say something about framerate too hehe. Oblivion seems to run fast atleast but that's to be expected since ati cards rock in oblivion. And now I have to sneak in why I figured ati instead of nvidia. Ati generally seem to be faster in more complex scenes where framerates already are low and their cards also have higher lowest frames according to what I've seen. Atleast in oblivion and I'm figuring that will also be true in the future since games are getting more complex.
Right now I'm playing gothic 3 and framerates with the 7600gt was at it's highest 25 fps at 1024x768 and high quality. With the ati I got a shock when I booted up gothic 3, I could run 1280 and still have TWICE as high framerate in alot of places. It does dip down to 12-15 fps but so did the 7600gt... But running in third person one can play at 18ish fps without feeling like killing the computer and anyone that gets close. In prey I could increase the resolution from 1024x768 no AA to 1280*1024 4xAA and was still faster. Now fraps mostly run 50-60 fps, probably alot higher at times but the game is capped at 60 fps. Also tried F.E.A.R but that wasn't so much faster though. Can't remember how fast doom 3 was on the 7600 and I've installed an extreme quality mod during while I had the nvidia card. I seem to rememeber it was slow but since my memory isn't ECC who knows... Atleast now demo1 is 76 fps during the second run since the first run is mostly hdd trashing :P X3 reunion doesn't seem to be too much faster either but I think that game is cpu bound very often.
Still have my trusty old venice core amd 3000+ running at 2.6Ghz. Might get a core 2 duo during spring when the "cheaper" models come out. Won't be that much cheaper but they run at 800 mhz fsb instead of 1066 so it's alot easier to oc them. If they can't regularily oc to atleast 3Ghz there's really not that much point in getting one since it won't be that much faster in games that only use one core.
That should be enough for now, my next blogging will most likely be within one week and will be about 2 games. And one you might figure out if you read this post.
So far I'm very happy with the card. It has the arctic cooling accelero cooler installed by default, it's insanely silent. More silent than the silent thermalright v1 I had on my 7600gt and I had a 19db fan on that. It's also very good at cooling, core stays at around 50 during load. And I've found out that most x1950 pro cards has 3rd party coolers :D Very good since they usually cool better and are more silent than original ones. Tv quality seems to be better on the new ati card for some reason though I miss the auto maximize videos on the second installed screen. Have no idea if ati has that or not since ccc aka. catalyst control center doesn't work for me. So I can't change ANY settings like AA or such stuff. Luckily it can be done inside newer games. Can't really overclock the card either since there isn't really any support for the card in 3rd party oc progs. In most programs the computer just crash if one does ANY change on the core/memory speed.
Ati traytools party works atleast, one can overclock the core but the memory is read wrong so that's not overclockable. I managed to get the core up to about 640-650 before it crashed. But I didn't look that closely since I had it on automatic overclocking. So less than 10% overclockability on the core. Have no idea about memory but from what I've heard it's not that overclockable either. Hopefully there will also be software vmodding on this card so I'll be able to oc to atleast 700 Mhz. But the ones that have hardware vmodded the x1950 pro cards say the volt regulators get very hot when vmodding even a little and apparently they are also a bit hard to cool.
Remember, a graphics card can never be too fast so one NEEDS to overclock it ;)And in my oppinion anything less than a 10% oc isn't even a tiny bit impressive. 20% is where it should be and 30% is good. Over that it pretty much rocks. Oh, guess I should say something about framerate too hehe. Oblivion seems to run fast atleast but that's to be expected since ati cards rock in oblivion. And now I have to sneak in why I figured ati instead of nvidia. Ati generally seem to be faster in more complex scenes where framerates already are low and their cards also have higher lowest frames according to what I've seen. Atleast in oblivion and I'm figuring that will also be true in the future since games are getting more complex.
Right now I'm playing gothic 3 and framerates with the 7600gt was at it's highest 25 fps at 1024x768 and high quality. With the ati I got a shock when I booted up gothic 3, I could run 1280 and still have TWICE as high framerate in alot of places. It does dip down to 12-15 fps but so did the 7600gt... But running in third person one can play at 18ish fps without feeling like killing the computer and anyone that gets close. In prey I could increase the resolution from 1024x768 no AA to 1280*1024 4xAA and was still faster. Now fraps mostly run 50-60 fps, probably alot higher at times but the game is capped at 60 fps. Also tried F.E.A.R but that wasn't so much faster though. Can't remember how fast doom 3 was on the 7600 and I've installed an extreme quality mod during while I had the nvidia card. I seem to rememeber it was slow but since my memory isn't ECC who knows... Atleast now demo1 is 76 fps during the second run since the first run is mostly hdd trashing :P X3 reunion doesn't seem to be too much faster either but I think that game is cpu bound very often.
Still have my trusty old venice core amd 3000+ running at 2.6Ghz. Might get a core 2 duo during spring when the "cheaper" models come out. Won't be that much cheaper but they run at 800 mhz fsb instead of 1066 so it's alot easier to oc them. If they can't regularily oc to atleast 3Ghz there's really not that much point in getting one since it won't be that much faster in games that only use one core.
That should be enough for now, my next blogging will most likely be within one week and will be about 2 games. And one you might figure out if you read this post.
posted by JaRoD at
10:21 PM
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