Slashdot Mirror
Affordable Modern Graphics Cards
EconolineCrush writes "If graphics cards that cost more than a mortgage payment make your wallet quiver, it's worth checking out ATI's Radeon X700 and NVIDIA's GeForce 6600 series. Both are based on cut down versions of latest and greatest graphics chips, but at under $200, they sell for a fraction of the price of high-end cards. What's more, these $200 wonders outperform last year's $500 cards, sometimes by embarrassingly large margins. The Tech Report has in-depth reviews of both the GeForce 6600GT and Radeon X700 XT if you're in the market for a next-gen graphics card that's a little more affordable."
Almost two years back, I picked up a Radeon 8500LE for under $100. (actually, about $80) At the time, the Radeon 9700 and 9500 were top and second tier DX9 cards. The 8500 was a third-tier DX8.1 card. While it didn't have the latest features, it *was* feature-complete to the previous set.
These are good $200 cards, no doubt. But it looks to me as if the sub-$100 cards haven't made as much *relative* progress as the more expensive ones.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Still waiting for AGP version... AGP versions aren't even announced yet, only PCI Express.
Somewhere later in October or November.
- Arwen, I'm your father, Agent Smith.
- Well, you're just Smith, but my father is Aerosmith!
(From a rejected story I submitted)
This Inquirer story says that ATI will be beginning a big "Linux driver push" in the next couple of weeks - a driver based upon their Catalyst drivers, supposesly giving a speed boost to DoomIII.
Personally, I'd just like drivers that don't segv under Xorg 6.8.0
www.eFax.com are spammers
My mortgage payment is $350. $500 > $350, so a high end graphics card would be more than a mortgage payment.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
The 6600GT seems to run Doom3 almost as well as a 6800. ~60 FPS at 1600x1200 in high quality. So, I think "crush" is the right term.
From the Quadro FX Features and Benefits page:
I suppose they included this feature on the GeForce 6800 for the Mac because they don't make "workstation" Quadro GPUs for the Mac. As you probably know, there is not much difference between their workstation and desktop GPUs. The only big differences (besides price) are which features are enabled/disabled and drivers. I'm sure they can include this feature on the 6600, but I'm sure they won't.TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
Yes - I also had a Geforce 2 card, and it's currently for sale btw :) But a Geforce 2 and Geforce 2 MX cards are VERY different. Standard Geforce 2 cards use DDR memory - while MX cards use SDRAM, and it's much slower. So yes, I was able to barely play UT2004 on my Geforce 2 GTS which had 32 megs of ram on it, I even overclocked it a touch to get extra fps out of it, but with only 32 megs, it just wasn't going to work. Geforce 3 series cards are amazing, and so are Geforce 4 Ti cards. All the mx cards are crap however, along with the FX 5200 cards. My geforce 2 GTS smoked my FX 5200 with 128 megs of ram I had at work, and that's just plain said.
2nd Last page of GeForce review mentions the power draw and that it is most-likely that the 6600 can get away without a 2nd power connector by using the beefier power from the PCI-E bus. Nice to see a power comparison...
120W for an idle video card is quite high. I'm considering a mobile ath64 3400+ powered desktop system, and the CPU only draws 85W. Eventual goal is a fixed mount solar/wind powered watercooled mobile visualization workstation in a camper... because it can be done and because the winters are too long and cold up here in Canada.
For just about any single piece of hardware.
I'll go a bit over that if I need to, but that's my target price range.
I paid $109 for my DVD Burner. I paid like $208 for my Processor + Mobo(In my mind about $104 for each of them). I paid about $150 for my HDD.
I got my GeForce 4MX for about $25. I'll probably be getting a new video card some time next year, but whatever I can get in the $100 range is what I'll get. These things depreciate so rapidly, I can't justify spending $200 for a video card.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
In SoCal, you're talking about US$400K to US$500K for a 3 bedroom starter house. For a five bedroom, you're talking aboug $700K.
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
Same card, and paid $70 2 years ago.. Run the Omega drivers and clock it at 275mhz. Get about 9300 of the old style 2001 3dmarks with an XP1700 running at 166mhz bus speed. Gets stuttery on some games, and I have to run Doom3 at 640x480 with all the goodies on.
My son just replaced his 8500le with a 9700pro and he is running an old k7s5a mobo with sdram and an underclocked XP2400. He just get Rome total war yesterday and it runs great at 1024x768 with all the eyecandy on.
Financially, it's a good thing to stay a generation or two behind on graphics cards. With these new cards, 9800 pros will be under $150.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
Yes, but on VIVOs, the pipelines are simply disabled, not nonexistant. I know, because I've flashed many of them and they all work fine. Its because of how ATI handles their chip fab process--chips that can't handle XT speeds but have 16 pipes are clocked down to Pro speeds and 4 of the pipes disabled through the BIOS. And a flash re-enables them. All VIVOs have these chips--most regular X800s don't.
The X800 does not support Pixel Shader 3.0, only 2.0; ATI's logic being that games that use PS 3.0 won't begin to appear until after at least one more video card generation anyway. Also, the X800 is little more than a rev and scaling-up of the Radeon 9800 core, while nVidia discarded the FX architecture and redid the 6800 from the ground up.
And in Northern Idaho we call that "most of Northern Idaho". :-)
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Below is the US INCOME distribution. The asset distribution is even crazier, with the top 1% owning about 43% of US wealth, and the bottom 40% owning less than a 1%. If you go below the bottom 25th percentile, most of those people have what we call negative ownership, where they owe more than they own. Many in this bracket will pay substantial portions of their income in interest. Go to the top of the income distribution pile, and you'll find that quite a few make most of their money from interest and other dividends off what they own.
From the Census Bureau [census.gov] for 2001:
The little "wires" connecting things inside a chip are called "traces", and are the thinnest things you can draw on a chip. So "trace size" is used as a yardstick to compare chips for how small their various parts can be. (You will often see the word "process", as in "90 nanometer process" instead of "90 nanometer traces"). The smaller the trace size, the less power dissipation. Both of these new chips have a small trace size, although the articles didn't say exactly how small.
If you make a chip, and then you improve your chip-making technology so that you can draw thinner traces, you can perform a "die shrink": you produce a similar chip design, using the smaller traces, and the whole chip takes up a smaller amount of space. You can buy some graphics cards that are basically an older GPU with a die shrink; they dissipate very little heat and are inexpensive. A GeForce4 MX (budget card) was basically a GeForce 3 with a die shrink, IIRC.
Chips are made from silicon wafers. One whole wafer is "fabbed" (made in a chip fabrication plant), then cut up for individual chips. The more chips per wafer, the cheaper each chip is. (This is all the more true because flaws can happen during the fabbing process; if one flaw means one dead chip, then more chips per wafer means a similar number of flaws results in a lower percentage of dead chips made, and thus lower costs.)
A smaller trace size makes it easier to push the clock rate higher. But GPUs are definitely clocked lower than CPUs, so that helps them dissipate less heat. If you are pushing a Pentium 4 at 3 GHz, and the GPU is only doing 0.7 GHz, clearly that helps the GPU dissipate less heat.
Smaller trace sizes make it harder to make the chip work right; the smaller the traces, the more problems you might have electrically (I don't fully understand the details). Also, you need to be more careful with cooling; a hot chip with a tiny die size needs a really good heatsink, and there is less margin for error. The old, relatively large chips like the 486 family were easy to cool in comparison with today's chips.
Summary:
Smaller trace size means less heat
Lower clock rate means less heat
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
The 120W figure is for the entire system not just the video card.
Q.