[Kazan]

technically the boards do have AGP - they just didn't install the connector

very assholish on the part of dell

[Ace Pace]

Originally posted by kv1at3485


Well, the card itself wasn't the problem.  My brother had bought a new system with an ASUS P4C800E-DLX motherboard as its base.  Now apparently some of the 9500 Pros (as denoted by their serial numbers) are not suitable for that board.  So he kept plugging them in and they kept getting messed up.

It wasn't until after the second fiasco when I went through the motherboard's documentation that we discovered the error, and so my brother was finally able to request a 9500 Pro of the suitable type.

On a side note, while this entire episode was occuring he used my 9000 Pro instead.  As my computer had a heart attack everytime I downgraded to my Rage 128 (you can imagine how many times I got back my 9000 Pro with the belief that the problem had been fixed only to find it had not and being forced to give the 9000 Pro back) I finally got fed up and bought myself a 9600 Pro so that the 9000 Pro could remain in reserve.  (As further compensation for my troubles, he bought me SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition.)

So now my brother has a working 9500 Pro (lucky duck) and I have a 9600 Pro (not so lucky duck).  And I hope my brother will upgrade his graphics card soon so I can inherit that 9500 Pro...

Why hasn't your brother tweaked it to a 9700? the 9500 is basicly a 9700 tweaked.

[kv1at3485]

Originally posted by Ace Pace


Why hasn't your brother tweaked it to a 9700? the 9500 is basicly a 9700 tweaked.

I'm not sure if he's 'tweaked' the 9500 Pro or not.

[Kosh]

Originally posted by Kazan
um.. there are not pentium 4 motherboards without AGP to my knowledge

Not mainstream. Some of the cheapest OEM models have no AGP slots (some Dell, HP's, etc).



EDIT: But at least Dell isn't that bad with their laptops. For desktops I always build my own.

[Sandwich]

Originally posted by Ace Pace


Why hasn't your brother tweaked it to a 9700? the 9500 is basicly a 9700 tweaked.

IIRC, that depends on if the 4x2 (4 top, 4 bottom) memory chips are laid out in an "L" shape around the GPU, or arrayed in a straight line. Straight line means a physical bus width of 128 bits, which sucks. "L" shaped means a physical bus width of 256 bits, limited by a BIOS setting to 128 bits, and thus changable.

IIRC, YMMV.

[Fear]

Originally posted by kv1at3485


I'm not sure if he's 'tweaked' the 9500 Pro or not.

you are confusing with the radeon 9500 NON PRO, pro cant be tweaked to 9700pro, something to do with  the pipeline. beside to even O/c the 9500/9700 series is a headache, with those stupid bios protectiom.

radeon 9500 is the best buy i ever bought till now, and when i found out 9600 is a bit slower i was even happier. it was fater than 4600 at the time, and when the fx series came out it was faster than the "great" fx 5600. and it only cost 1200 NIS(300$~).

holds doom3,farcry,GRound control. all on high in my crappy computer. 2 bad they stop producing it:(

[Falcon]

Scew AGP! PCI Express is the way to go!  

Im waiting to get a motherboard with PCI Express technology its said to be faster than AGP.

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by IceFire

With Dell, anything is possible.

*shudder*

I believe the same thing happened to a mate of mine.... stuck with a nice integrated Intel gpu piece-of-****e in a Dell machine his dad bought.  Poor sod.


(Actually, i'm on a Dell laptop at the mo.  Didn't buy it though.)

[Ace Pace]

Originally posted by Falcon
Scew AGP! PCI Express is the way to go!  

Im waiting to get a motherboard with PCI Express technology its said to be faster than AGP.

PCI-e will be faster in the end, but right now, there is no differance you can see, as all games are used to storing everything inside the graphics card, and barely use the bus.

[übermetroid]

yea well remember, alienware has teh dual pci-e comming out.  

[Ace Pace]

Originally posted by ubermetroid
yea well remember, alienware has teh dual pci-e comming out.  

It would be cheaper to wait for a Nforce4 motherboard, and get SLI.

[Cyker]

Dells tend to use custom hardware, and espescially on the ones with on-board graphics they omit the AGP slots. It's not that uncommon to see Dells and HP/Compaqs with 3xPCI slots and no AGP.

As for the replacement graphics card, forget about ATI - They don't make any PCI cards to my knowledge. (EDIT - Ignore that, there are ATI PCI Radeons available. I really should learn to read Well, live and learn )
nVidia do, but they are VERY hard to find, and actually cost a fair bit. You can't get high-end versions within a line on nVidia PCI, but the lower-speed ones should be fine. (e.g. you could get a Ti4200 but not a Ti4600).

Your best bet will be mail-order, espescially the more specialist places. I don't know about where you live, but finding gear like that in a shop in the UK is almost impossible

As for the speed, don't worry about it. AGP is VASTLY overrated - Running my Ti4200 at AGP 1x with Sideband Addressing and Fastwrites OFF runs at almost the same speed as AGP 4x with SBA and Fastwrites ON!!
The only place it makes difference is load times (Because the textures get transferred faster) and on games with really high poly counts, and even then the speed difference isn't as bad as you'd think. The FPS extremes fair a bit different, but it doesn't affect the feel as much as you'd think...

I'm not saying AGP is a white elephant - the performance boost is there - But if tweak your game so that you can fit all textures in VideoRAM and the T&L is caching trangle data (Which most modern cards do IIRC) then the amount of data being thrown into your card will low enough that PCI can cope and you will still get 30+ FPS.

So despite going PCI you're not loosing out as much as you might think. Heck, a PCI Voodoo 2 still slaughtered the AGP TNT's in terms of FPS

PCI-X looks promising but never underestimate corporations's ability to screw things up
But when it does come out, we'll have to essentially replace all our gear anyway so don't bother waiting.

Oh, and when it comes time for the next full-computer upgrade, build it yourself!!!
It is a VERY valuable learning experience

[Cyker]

Originally posted by ubermetroid
yea well remember, alienware has teh dual pci-e comming out.  

I watch with interest on how they intend to do this - PCI-X only has 20 channels, and all PCI-X graphics cards are gonna need 16-channel slots.

The only I can see an SLI'd PCI-X setup is for OEMs to put TWO PCI-X controllers on-board.

And if they *do* go that way... well... I'm glad I'm not the poor git who has to design the motherboard. We could be seeing 12-layer boards!!

[karajorma]

Why was the R9600 slower than the R9500? I remember reading that it was cause of some changes ATI made that were better in the long run for the Radeon series but I can't remember what it was.

[Cyker]

Probably something to do with the render pipeline.

nVidia had a similar problem before - They made their pipeline more complex and it slowed down the card, and everyone dissed them for it.
When newer more complex games came out 'tho, it blew the older cards out of the water because it could do it's renders in 1-2 passes whereas older cards needed 4-6 passes.

[Ace Pace]

Originally posted by Cyker


I watch with interest on how they intend to do this - PCI-X only has 20 channels, and all PCI-X graphics cards are gonna need 16-channel slots.

The only I can see an SLI'd PCI-X setup is for OEMs to put TWO PCI-X controllers on-board.

And if they *do* go that way... well... I'm glad I'm not the poor git who has to design the motherboard. We could be seeing 12-layer boards!!

The second card only needs 4X lines.