Radeon x850 questions

[carnes_john]

I recently bought the Radeon X850 Pro AGP 256mb, I was wondering what you guys thought of this card. If it will perform well with all the eye candy stuff on high for games like doom3 and half life 2 ? I also have an AGP 4x slot, if I bought a new motherboard with AGP 8x will this make the card perform any better? Also my current motherboard is only capable of running ddr pc2100, if I bought a new motherboard capable of PC3200, would this make a big difference on performace?


System Specs
Amd Athlon 2400XP 2.0ghz
1gb ram
2X40gb western digial 7200rpm
Radeon x850 Pro AGP 256mb

John

 

[DoomUK]

Your system will be bottlenecked by your CPU and RAM bandwidth unfortunately, not so much the AGP 4x bandwidth (recent benchmarks have shown very little difference in AGP 4x and 8x even with a high-end card, if none). But, you should still be able to run Doom 3 and HL2 on high settings. HL2 in particular is pretty CPU intensive though, so I'd be interested to see how it performs on an older CPU architecture.

 

[dhw200]

I would never recommend the Radeon X850 series (i know i have one, and i regret it), least of all the Pro. It only has 12 pipes. That aside, things would definitly improve if u used PC 3200. If u have an option, RMA the X850 Pro, and pick up a 6800 GT instead

 

[diabloII]

1.) pc2100...that's losing more than 1 gig of bandwidth per second..really gonna hurt you there
2.) if you can, return that X850, the 6800GT is much better and cheaper

 

[carnes_john]

I thank you guys for the quick posts back. I just bought the card this weekend, so I will look into the 6800Gt.

John

 

[beedubaya]

I thank you guys for the quick posts back. I just bought the card this weekend, so I will look into the 6800Gt.

John

I have the X800 Pro, which is very similar to the X850 Pro with slightly lower clock speeds, and I have to say you by far should have went with the 6800 GT...and like you said, you should look into it. Most X800/X850 owners like myself and dhw strongly regret our purchases because the Nvidia 6800 series of cards is so much better.