I seem to have placed myself in quite a predicament.
When I built my computer over last summer, I chose a socket 754 mobo for my already purchased Athlon 64 2800+. Of course, this limited me to an AGP slot for the graphics card. I chose the 9800 Pro 128MB because of its great reviews and great price.

Unfortunately, these new PC games that are going to arrive this year and next are going to make my 9800 Pro look really old. Not only that, but the upgradability factor for my rig is very low because of the socket 754 format for the CPU and AGP for the graphics card.

So, is their still a modern graphics card, that uses AGP, that would be much more powerful than my 9800 Pro? Pixel Shader 3 support prefered.

Or would it be better to get a new Mobo with PCI-E, socket 939 CPU, and buy a newer PCI-E graphics card?

My budget is small, $500 MAX

Also, I'm hoping for XBOX 360 graphics capability, but I understand that probably won't happen.


-----System Specs-----
Athlon 64 2800+ @ 2.0GHz
LanParty UT 250 Mobo
1 Gig Generic DDR400 RAM
9800 Pro 128MB @ 435/378
2x80GB CaviarSE RAID 0

__________________
If you have any questions you can email me at zack.schmid@gmail.com.

Hi Schmidget, welcome to itsallPC

The best graphics card you can get for AGP would be a choice between:

• ATI Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition
  Probably the best AGP graphics card money can buy. I can vouch for this architecture.
• NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra
  An excellent card. Supports Shader Model 3.0, where the X850 supports Pixel Shader 2.0c and Vertex Shader 2.0. Some let downs.

As an owner of a Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition (More or less identical to the Radeon X850 XT, one model bellow the Platinum Edition.), I can guarantee that these cards can just about handle the latest releases at near-maximum detail/resolution settings.

However, your socket 754 is not a restriction to an upgrade path to PCI Express. Thanks to the use of a HyperTransport bus, the Chipset to Processor wiring is exactly the same, so any new chipset should be able to support socket 754 processors when the motherboard PCB permits. Those extra 185 pins are for power and memory interface.

The only motherboard model I know off the top of my head, would be the ASUS K8N4-E series (or K8N-VM, but that's a budget model really), but I'm sure most reputable brands like Gigabyte will offer similar solutions. Be aware though, that if you did decide to cut costs and upgrade just the motherboard, you would be stuck with the old Single Channel architecture; in which the fastest processor model is the Athlon 64 3700+. If you really did want to switch to PCI-Express and get something better than either listed card above, your processor would start to be a bottle neck, so in that situation, you may as well just switch to socket 939 and fork out for all thee; processor, motherboard and graphics card.

If I were you, I'd be temped to pick up a GeForce 6800 GS, Radeon X800 XL or Radeon X850 Pro and stick with that until you're system is tired enough for a major overhaul.

Thanks...
What about the 7800GS. I've heard a lot of good things about that. How does that compare to the 6800 Ultra?
Ok, a few last questions:

How much would that A64 2800+ affect the performance of the coming games of 2006/2007?

Also, what is better for the money:
The GeForce 7800GS or the Geforce 6800 Ultra?

Finally, I'm not sure specifically what PSU I have, but it is a 500 watt with 18A on the 12v rail. Is this powerful enough to support the either of the two GF cards above along with the rest of the system?

__________________
If you have any questions you can email me at zack.schmid@gmail.com.

Yeah, the GeForce 7800 GS is definitely a remarkable card, but it's fairly early in the release cycle to properly determin how it performs by comparison.

Inheriting the G70 architecture makes it technologically superior to both of them, but it's a rather cut-down model. From what I've seen and read, it's roughly equivalent to both the old flagship models. This is remarkable because, where as all three have 16 "pipelines", the GeForce 7800 GS has a low core clock speed of 370 MHz, vs the 450 MHz of the GeForce 6800 Ultra and 540 MHz of the Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition. It responds exceptionally well to overclocking also; obliteraterating the equivalent competition.

If you plan to overclock it, the 7800 GS could be the card for you. I didn't mention the model because I avoid recommending parts which are likely to have odd quirks, unpredictable performance and unpredictable availability. I also let a little of my own preference leak in; if two products are going to be roughly equal, I'd rather have the old high-end product than the new mid-end product, as a matter of overall product quality.

Your Athlon 64 2800+ is certainly going to lose you a few frames in some unfolding titles, but not all of them. F.E.A.R. is an example of a fresh title that doesn't seem to care at all what processor you're using, where as anything based on the Doom III engine is CPU cycle hungry.

Both cards should retail for more or less the same price; the 6800 Ultra a little cheaper. Money will be less the issue.

18A on +12 is a little weak, but probably sufficient for your existing processor plus a new graphics card.

I did some researching of the prices of each.

The GF6800 Ultra is around $450 and the GF7800GS is just about $300-350.

Even though there is a significant price difference the 7800GS seems to have equal, and often, have better framerates the GF6800 Ultra acording to the benches at Toms Hardware: http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/02/...et/page15.html

After reading that, I am hesitant of purchasing a 6800 Ultra. But what do you think?

BTW: I think I am going to stick with nVidia due to its Shader 3 support even though the X850XT is technically more powerful. Not to mention how many "nVidia Optimized" games there are out there. If that really means anything.

Also, I read somewhere not to go with the 6800 Ultra because the 6800GS could be oc'd very easily to Ultra speeds.

And I'm not afraid to void warrenties unless the card has a history of malfunctioning.

Thanks for all the replys!

__________________
If you have any questions you can email me at zack.schmid@gmail.com.

That sounds like retail pricing of old stock. Anyone still carrying the GeForce 6800 Ultra would be foolish not to drop the price now, else they'll never sell.

Always take Toms Hardware with a pinch of salt. Too often their reviews read like theories they've set out to prove, and on occasion, they publish misinformation. In this circumstance however, they're more or less correct.

The practical differences between Shader Model 2.0c (ATI's extension to 2.0) and Shader Model 3.0 are of little overall importance, and often just represent futureproofing (For example, the instruction length limit on 2.0 is 96, 768 on 2.0c and 65536 on 3.0. To put this into perspective, few games us instruction lengths longer than 50, and none that I know of have lengths longer than 100). Shader Model 3.0 is basically a performance boost.

There are less "NVIDIA Optimized" games than you may think. Many good engines have "optimized paths" for different graphics architectures. The NVIDIA branding program, like much of the marketing materials NVIDIA produces, is aimed to give you the idea that they're somehow superior, or winning the graphics card war. In reality, there is no war; there are two companies trying to steal away the market from eachother any which way they can, and as long as we research the claims instead of just blindly upholding the complicated terms as cannon, we prosper from it.

Look at it this way: why would a game developer choose one graphics architecture over another? To piss off half their prospective market? I think not. They will accept large bundles of money to endorse a card however. Some games run better on some graphics cards than others, simple because of the programmer's approach.

All in all, I'd have to say you'd be the best candidate for an NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GS, especially if you want to thrash it. I might be tempted to go a different way, but that's based on experience similar situations. Once you get used to the various little idiosyncrasies of NVIDIA products, I'm sure it'd be fine.

Thanks.

You write like a professional author so, I give you "props" for that. You do a great job of explaining things thoroughly and that is a great skill. So, just one(or more) thing(s).

So, speaking of "complicated terms"
I would appreciate if you could define a few things, just to clarify for someone with a very small vocab:

What does that mean exactly? It almost sounds like destroy it or thow it away, but I don't think that is the intended definition.

Same question as above.

Also, I am in no way biased toward ATI or nVidia. I have had pretty good experience with both. The only problem I have ever had with ATI is the off-brand manufacturer's fault, and not ATI's (Fan burned out..long story).

The only reason I really wanted Pixel Shader 3.0 is for just what you said...for "futureproofing." And for when games have a menu to decide between pixel shader versions, like Spinter Cell 3. They only have the choice between 1.1 and 3.0. Even though they probably could have given the same image quality for pixel shader 2.0.

Also, thanks for clarifying the "nVidia" optimized games thing.

__________________
If you have any questions you can email me at zack.schmid@gmail.com.

It's probably no small coincidence then, that I am a professional writer :P

By Thrash it, I mean (in the extreme) hole up in a small room with the curtains closed, over clock it till your system is just about stable and play games for 48 hours straight :P. That's a real test of a graphics card's longevity. A Radeon 9600 SE for example, will crumble under these conditions.

By idiosyncrasies, I mean, the funny little things that the card does that you just have to live with. For example, a Radeon X800-series card has slight visual abnormalities in old Unreal Engine games of certain builds, doesn't allow Antialiasing in a number of games due to a lack of Supersampling mode (allows Multisampling only) and so on. A GeForce 6800 series card often doesn't quite handle shadows correctly in newer games, occasionally renders large black shapes in certain games for no apparent reason and so on. They're simply inherent defects in either the drivers or the architecture that you have to learn and deal with. I'm not sure what characteristics a GeForce 7800-series core has; I've not yet owned one.


The interesting thing about futureproofing is there is really no such thing. In a rather predictable cycle, graphics engineers come up with fantastic ideas on how to improve visual quality and performance, and allocate large efforts into developing this new technology while marketing departments sit around broad tables and perfect well packaged misconceptions about things they barely understand.

Game engine developers examine the feature to decide whether or not it fits into their plans, and if so, incorporate it into their engine. However, once a game engine is at a certain stage, it's not possible to implement certain features without major rewrites that are dangerous because they tend to brake existing code. An example of this is Far Cry, which started out with Pixel Shader 1.1 and received consecutive patches updating it to 2.0b and 3.0, each of which introduced new and more profound bugs.

Considering that a game engine usually takes at least a year to develop, and even parallel developed games take an additional few years, it leaves a rather long lag between the introduction of a technology and the actual application of it. Add to that, the fact that many new features are rejected due to lack of maturity, usually they're not actually fast enough. John Carmack, lead developer for the Quake engines, many years ago wrote in his .plan that the then new Pixel Shader technology was incomplete and too slow for serious use. Furthermore, it can take a while for programmers to get their head around the applications for these new features, the delay is rather long. There was a near 2 year delay between the release of the first Pixel Shader 2.0 core (R350; Radeon 9700) and the mainstream implementation (as opposed to a few extra pieces of candy thrown into games for lucky owners).

What it boils down to, is by the time games will come to utilize Shader Model 3.0 as a fundamental feature, the GeForce 7800 GS will be stone age. As an example, the Unreal Engine 3, which relies on Pixel Shader 3.0 for its High Dynamic Range and huge Normal Mapping technology, was at a licensing stage early last year. At this point the GeForce 6800 Ultra could squeeze out barely decent frame rates just for simple technology demos while during early development a GeForce FX 5950 Ultra was producing less than 10 frames per second. As yet, there are no games out that utilize thsi engine, but the parallel developed game "Gears of War" should be on the shelves in 2007, and will probably push the GeForce 7800 GTX 512 to it's limits. By then, the next new revision of Pixel Shaders will be in the cooking pot.

Even so, it doesn't change the suitability of the GeForce 7800 GS today; it just means that it's inherently not futureproof due to it's lack of performance. Sorry to be such a naysayer, but sometimes it helps one to know these things :P

You have definitely helped me more than anybody else in any other forum.

This is a little of topic, but I saw your 3DMark 05 framerate, and I am very impressed. My 9800 pro can barely chug along at 5fps.

Anyway...

Lets just say, hypotheticaly, that I was playing Gears of War with a 6800 Ultra AGP. Would the framerate be above 25? I say that because to "squeeze out barely decent frame rates" is a matter of opinion. For me anything above 20 is playable (depending on the circumstances). This is partially due to my playing games at 10fps when I was younger. I got used to slow performance, although not playing games at extemely low fps recently might have spoiled me :P.

How much of an improvement would there be over my 9800 Pro if I switched to a GF6800U/oc'd GF6800GS/GF7800GS in terms of multiplication? Example: 3x faster, 4x faster, ~1.2427x faster, etc.

I'm hoping that by 2007 I will have a job with a high enough pay to allow me to build a completely new system. But incase that doesn't happen I still want a computer that will compete with those of my friends. But I am in no hurry because, right now, there isn't much of a comparison :P! Most of them are console gamers at heart. They are just now getting into PC gaming due to the computers that I have built them.

The prices of the 7800GS and 6800Ultra are virtualy identical as are there benchmarks. So I would probably go with the 6800 Ultra because it has been out longer. Is it easy to OC on stock cooling?

Sorry to be asking so many questions, I just want to understand as much as possible because soon I will be starting my own buisness of building, diagnosing, and repairing computers. That can be quite a feat for somebody who won't be turning 16 until May ;D!


Ok, I'm pretty sure those was the last questions. But for the sake of completion I have to ask, though it is off topic. You say you are a professional writer. Do you write for a magazine, website (besides this), books, newspapers?

__________________
If you have any questions you can email me at zack.schmid@gmail.com.

Thought I might as well throw this in...

Can the GF6800U/oc'd GF6800GS/GF7800GS handle these graphics:

__________________
If you have any questions you can email me at zack.schmid@gmail.com.

I had a 9800 Pro myself a few years ago. After I killed that, I stepped up to my current card. I can honestly say, that the performance boost between the R35x/NV3x and R4xx/NV4x was the biggest I'd seen since the release of the 3Dfx Voodoo 2. Most games doubled in performance, many tripled.

Gaging the practical performance of a card is no easy thing really. Firstly, it's a matter of how low a frame rate you're prepared to put up with (I can't really deal with anything bellow 50 before it starts to irritate me). Secondly, it's how far you can push the settings; which is directly dependant on the first point. Benchmarks give us a good indication of a card's potential when all things are equal to the eye, but the most important thing is how high you can pump up the details before the frame rate takes a dive. Lets face it, anything over about 60 frames per second is just gravy. Of course, average frame rates mess these things up too. An average of 50 is one thing, but if it swings between 5 and 100 that's not playable. Doom III is a good example of a diving frame rate; you can sit on 60 most of the time, but when the heat's on you're watching a slide show.

Personally, I feel that if you cannot play a game the way the developers intended it to be played, you shouldn't. I've seen people struggle through games like Half-Life 2 without any water effects or Quake 4 with shadows off. It seems like playing games for gaming's sake; It's only half as immersive at it would otherwise would be. On the other hand, you seem to have a rather high bad-frame-rate threshold - usually a trait of someone who's had to put up with terrible frame rates for years. If I had to make a prediction, I would say that Gears of War and Unreal Tournament 2007 (the screenshot you posted) would be quite playable for you on middling configuration settings - let's estimate 1024x768, medium quality.

As for games of the past and present; anything you've been able to play to date at good settings will now be playable at maximum, Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic filtering; anything you've not quite been able to play will be playbale at maximum detail with some Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic filtering.


You wont be able to expect good a fantastic overclock from a GeForce 6800 Ultra; but there is a lot of difference between the models. The default core clock speed is 400 MHz. 425 MHz should be easy, 450 MHz is common. Things get difficult over 470 MHz. Memory should be at 550 MHz DDR (1.1 GHz). The overclockability of this element is completely dependant on the modules that have been selected by the board manufacturer; you may find no movement whatsoever, or you could get 600 Mhz DDR (1.2 GHz) easy. The GeForce 7800 GS overclocks much more easily, because the stock 375 MHz is far bellow the "guaranteed" 430 MHz.


Questions are what itsallPC is all about Running a PC business is no simple thing, I hope you have sufficient knowledge to pull it off properly. The PC technician is a fraud; like a security consultant. Many have no remarkable skills or qualifications, they just know more than joe average. I would be reluctant to start a business myself, even with the knowledge I have.

I write mainly technical documents, but ghost write the odd article for various publications. I've written a few short fictions, and a novel that publishers don't seem very interested in. Thankfully, writing is not my main source of income, since no one seems to be particularly interested in hiring me long term. The truth is, it's because I'm probably not that good at it; like my computer knowledge, it's broad but nonspecific. More amateur than professional.


Don't worry about off-topic. We don't over concern ourselves with that here.

I'm probably going to go with the 7800GS due to its overclockability, but who knows, things could change because I don't have the money yet :! My balance comes to an astounding $20.82. I'll wait for more reviews to come, and then decide when I have the cash. I can't wait for gears of war to come out. But by then I will probably have enough money for a system overhaul. Hopefully this card gets me through the rest of the year. Thanks for all the replies.

And about the buisness, it's nothing more than the equivilant of "Joe's Handyman Service." Basicaly I will just charge other people for what I do for my friends and family for free. This can involve almost anything to do with the computer because it seems I am constantly learning how to do somthing else with it. A good example is that today and yesterday I've been slowly teaching myself how to design webpages from scratch in photoshop based on a few tutorials. Though I haven't mastered the skill yet, I am on my way.

I not only have a knowledge of the hardware aspect, as in computer building and repair, but I also have a limited and growing knowledge of the software aspect. I am learning a few programming languages from the classes I have taken, and am taking currently at school. These include Java, limited C++ (very limited :-\ ), and Visual Basic .NET. Not to mention my knowledge of Microsoft Office, various anti-spyware/virus, Nero, the Adobe Video Editing Suite, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, some flash, etc. Stuff like that comes in handy every now and then .

The buisness is on the very small scale. I'm not going to rent some office space somewhere, partly due to my not having any startup money, or the ability to work full time until summer. So it will most likely consist of me getting calls from people in my development (neighborhood) to fix some random problem. But that can be a rather easy form of income because I do that stuff constantly for free. At least twice a day I get calls from friends or relatives asking for some computer-tech help, and I can't help but to provide asistance, even if it means talking on the phone from upwards of 2 hours (their phone bill, not mine )


Wow, I guess I was on a roll! I'll put some of that on my resume!

There was only one thing that I was pondering...how much should I charge for the various services? I'm only 16 so I can't charge too much. My competition right now is the GEEK Squad from Best Buy.

Their Prices Are here: http://www.geeksquad.com/servicesand...teservices.php

I am confident that I can do all that they can do all of what is on that list.


So, about that novel (Schmidget completely forgets about the new gfx card and insists on something else) you wrote. I was wondering if you could, perhaps, send me a copy of it though email. Its not everyday you meet somebody who spent more that an hour writing something that didn't have to do with work or school. Maybe by some miracle a publisher comes to my door wondering if I have anything that needs publishing (yeah right :P ). You never know... zack.schmid@gmail.com

By the way, are you in the U.S. or U.K.? Just wondering...

You can take your time responding to this one, Syphus, since it doesn't have much of a sense of urgancy.

You're an example of total <:AwEsOmEnEsS:>

Note to self: awesomeness isn't a word

__________________
If you have any questions you can email me at zack.schmid@gmail.com.

Don't underestimate the amount of knowledge and experience an effective PC technician requires. There are plenty of technicians that know just enough to get by; how to use Windows, replace components etc. Of course, these are the technicians for whom the old format and reinstall is an acceptable fix for pretty much anything they don't understand. Over the years I did the retail computer thing, I learned countless things. Thinking back now, I can see how little I really did know over all, about how things worked and what could go wrong, even though I knew ten-fold more that most people.

The GEEK SQUAD's prices seem exorbitant, in the way that only an established company with a reputation could get away with. Even then, I can't see how something as simplistic as a memory installation is worth $129

I appreciate your interest, but I don't distribute digital copies of manuscripts I'm trying to sell to random people on the internet. I'm sure you understand just how foolish that really would be. :P

I'm in the far away country of New Zealand.