[Unknown Target]

Originally posted by ZylonBane
My just-built system has a 9700 (non-pro) in it, and I'm having some problems with it. Quite often, on boot-up, the text display will become scrambled for a few seconds. Worse, at any refresh rate above 60Hz I get a slight but visible shimmer/flicker in the corners of the screen. The fact that I had to hack the registry to get the drivers to respect the refresh rate setting on a non-PnP monitor didn't exactly endear it to me either.

Between this card and my Abit NF7 mobo problem (power button doesn't work after shutting down until PSU power cycled), I'm starting to regret going "alternative" on this system. Intel/NVidia, why did I forsake you?!

That is your monitor, plus, wtf did you expect with a built-in card?

[Liberator]

Note: He said just built, not built-in.  There's one hell of a difference.

Also the non-Pro 9700 is a known troublemaker.

I'm proud to say that until the laptop my father got from his work, that there has never been an Intel based computer in my home.  I've never had any problem from an AMD machine.

As far as a new card, if you don't have to upgrade don't, the FX is not enough of an improvement to warrant it.  If, however, you have got to get a new card and ATI is out, I would get an FX 5200, simply because it's the cheapest.  At the performance level we're talking about, you won't notice a difference until Doom 3 or Half-Life 2 get here.

[Admiral LSD]

Originally posted by Unknown Target
However, the new 9600's core is actually next-gen tech. I believe all other cards are on a .32 micron chip, while the Radeon is bigger or smaller, I forget which, so it's actually better in performance to a 5600 (or whatever Nvidia came out with, just before the 5900)

The thing with the 9600 Pro is that while it may have a higher clockspeed and the benefit of an R350 ancestry the fact that it only has 4 rendering pipelines (which is a hard limit as the chip was designed this way) it'll bog down quicker than the 9500 Pro which has all 8 R300 pipelines enabled. If you can find one, the 9500 Pro is still the better bet.

Oh, and my 8RDA+ (nForce2-ST, SPP+MCP-T) and Radeon 9500 Pro get along famously

[Nico]

Originally posted by Liberator
Also the non-Pro 9700 is a known troublemaker.

I have a non-pro 9700 and have no pb with it...

[Unknown Target]

You can hack the 9600 it to enable all 8 rendering pipelines.

[Nico]

most people can't do that, you know. most people wouldn't even want to try, actually.

[Admiral LSD]

Originally posted by Unknown Target
You can hack the 9600 it to enable all 8 rendering pipelines.

That's only possible with the non-Pro 9500 AFAIK, the 9600 has 4 rendering pipelines by design (it was meant to be cheaper to produce than 9500) making such mods impossible.

[ZylonBane]

Originally posted by Unknown Target
That is your monitor

No, it's not. This thing is a 21" Trinitron that performed flawlessly with my last system.

Eh, maybe a 300W PSU just isn't enough for a 9700.

And why would an embedded 9700 (if it existed) be inferior to a non-embedded one? Not following your logic here.

[vyper]

Originally posted by ZylonBane


And why would an embedded 9700 (if it existed) be inferior to a non-embedded one? Not following your logic here.

No dedicated V memory.

[ZylonBane]

Is that really that big a deal? Assuming it's not provided its own VRAM,  it's given a direct pipe to main RAM anyway, isn't it?

[Admiral LSD]

Anandtech compared the performance of the nForce2 IGP (essentially a GeForce 4 MX) in various RAM modes (both single and dual channel) to standalone MX cards and the results highlight the performance hit taken from relying totally on system memory for graphics:

http://www.anandtech.com/chipsets/showdoc.html?i=1731&p=7

It'd be an even bigger hit for a 9700 as even the non-Pro models have more than 6.4Gb/s of memory bandwidth available.