Graphics card buyers guide...
Apr 16 '04
The Bottom Line See the review for the best cards to buy and why!
Why am I writing a video card buying guide?
To tell you the truth, after building computers for customers, friends and family as well as myself for several years, I see conditions out there right now that will allow you to buy a screaming deal on a great video card, and I don’t believe that these deals will last very long! This guide is aimed mostly at the mid-range cards on the market, which lie in the $175-$225 range for people who perform a lot of gaming or video editing. I will explain why I would not go above this range, and also why it is my preference to not go below this range of pricing. This also does not review the options for video input, such as the All-In-Wonder cards or other video capture, as this is not something that I do nor know enough about to comment on.
That being said, if you are in the market for a mid-range card, now is the time to buy, in my opinion. I will explain why, as well as what the best deals are out there in my opinion! But first, lets talk about a few considerations…
AGP support
AGP comes in four flavors: 1X, 2X, 4X, and 8X. The speed indicates how fast the graphics card can communicate with the processor using the data highway, or bus. Standard bandwidth for the four speeds are as follows:
1X = 266 MB/s
2X = 533 MB/s
4X = 1.0 GB/s
8X = 2.1GB/s
As you can see, the higher the version, the faster the bandwidth. This also means that the newer the version, the faster your graphics card will communicate to the processor. This equals speed and performance! Check to make sure what speed of AGP your motherboard supports before buying a graphics card, as you want to buy the fastest available. There are several high-end boards that do not support anything but the 8X speed rating, so do not try to drop a 4X card into this board. On the other hand, most graphics cards that are rated for 8X will comply with a 4X board, but you should be aware you are halving your bandwidth by doing so. You will in essence be creating a bottleneck between your high-dollar card and the processor, rendering your card less effective. It will still work, but similar to putting a governor to control a Corvette to less than 55 MPH!
Additional Molex connections
Several of the newer graphics cards require more power than the AGP slot provides on its own. For this reason these cards now come with a Molex connection on the card, which allows you to plug another power cord into the card from the power supply. The new chips coming out from NVIDIA, the 6800Ultra, appears to have TWO additional Molex connections! This is the same connection used to power up the hard drives and optical drives. If your computer does not have a spare molex connector, do not even bother buying a higher end card requiring this connection. The cards will still work in most cases, but at much reduced performance! Once again, do you want to buy a Corvette and then find out you can only do 55 MPH max?
128MB or 256MB?
There are several cards available with 128MB of video RAM or 256MB of video RAM. Unless you are buying the top of the line, enthusiast cards, resist the temptation to buy the 256MB version. This is simply not needed and will not provide you with any additional performance at this time. A 1600X1200 display @ True Color (32 Bit) only requires 76.8MB to render. That leaves a large amount of memory for the game to utilize, and adding on an additional 128MB for a total of 256MB does nothing for the performance. There will be games and applications that will require this amount of RAM in the future, but wait until it is needed to buy it. There is no need to pay a premium today!
On to the guide…
Why buy a midrange card?
In my humble opinion, the midrange cards in the price range of $175-$225 are the cards that most people who use graphics intensive applications such as gaming or video editing should purchase. Below you will see my reasoning…
Economy Class
An economy class card such as a GeForce 5200 FX is indeed compatible with DirectX 9, and as such will work to display many of the newer games that will not run on DX8 compatible cards. These will also work for intensive video editing/playback. That being said, in most cases you will not be happy with the results, as there will be dropped frames, choppy gameplay and the like. If you are playing an FPS (First Person Shooter) game and you cannot turn fast enough to see the guy pulling a bead on you with his gun, you are dead. Of course if you have an economy class card, you can blame it on dropped frames as opposed to poor skills, but in either case you are still dead! Not a fun situation…
For comparison statistics, you can click over to Futuremark.com and go to the ORB section to review other people’s scores on the synthetic gaming benchmarks that use DX9. I know, these are synthetic and therefore do not NECESSARILY represent real world performance, but from what I have noticed they are a good indicator. A GeForce 5200 Ultra with 128MB of Video RAM averages the following:
Wings of Fury Demo: 101-110 FPS(frames per second)
Battle of Proxycon: 6-10 FPS
Trolls Lair Demo: 6-10 FPS
Mother Nature Demo: 5-7 FPS
On the other side of the fence, you have the ATI Radeon 9200 in the same price range of the GeForce 5200Ultra. The problem with the 9200 is that it does not support the DX9 compatibility, and therefore will not run the Mother Nature Demo. That being said, the typical scores of the 9200 non-pro are as follows:
Wings of Fury Demo: 80-100 FPS
Battle of Proxycon: 7-10 FPS
Trolls Lair Demo: 8-12 FPS
Mother Nature Demo: Not Supported!
Both of these cards can be had for roughly $85-95 USD in a boxed, retail set with some included software and 128MB of video RAM. I would recommend the 5200Ultra in the economy class(Less than $100), as it can run DX9 and is a newer, still supported chipset. It should be noted that some 9200 cards claim support for DX9, but from what I have read it is sketchy at best and Futuremark demo’s will still not run on them.
SIDE NOTE: This is probably a good time to discuss FPS, or Frames Per Second. This is a relatively intuitive term, defined as how many frames per second the graphics card generates. For reference, anything below 15 FPS will generally appear as choppy video, and several small programmed enhancements will be missed by the viewer. On the other hand, above about 30 FPS and the human eye cannot see distinguishable differences. That is not to say that you will not notice a difference between 30 FPS and 130 FPS, however. With the higher frame rates, your display will be able to exhibit items that were not previously seen, making the experience ‘better’. However, this is somewhat of a diminishing returns rule, meaning that it is not too noticeable and does not contribute significantly to gameplay/video editing.
Enthusiast Cards
The current enthusiast card market is dominated by the 9800XT by ATI and the 5950Ultra from NVIDIA. These cards are fast, Fast, FAST! The cards retail for somewhere in the $400 to $450 dollar range. For comparison purposes, the 9800XT can achieve the following scores on 3dMark03:
Wings of Fury Demo: 340-350 FPS
Battle of Proxycon: 65-70 FPS
Trolls Lair Demo: 55-60 FPS
Mother Nature Demo: 55-60 FPS
The 5950Ultra can do the following:
Wings of Fury Demo: 290-300 FPS
Battle of Proxycon: 50-55 FPS
Trolls Lair Demo: 35-40 FPS
Mother Nature Demo: 35-40 FPS
As you can see, the 9800XT edges out the 5950Ultra for gaming performance on synthetic benchmarks, but in reality you will probably never know it! Other than to say that you have the top dog, biggest, baddest, fastest video card around, there is absolutely no reason to buy either of these cards. As the gaming community begins to design more and more graphics into their system and take advantage of DX9 and the antialiasing/anistropic filtering, these cards will become more of a mainstream card. However, this will happen after successive releases by the video card companies and therefore the prices will come down, probably around $200 or so! Don’t waste your money on these cards, as you will not note the difference in gameplay over the mid range cards in my opinion.
Which mid-range cards are the best?
Right now is an ideal time to buy a mid-range video card, and I am going to tell you why. First of all, you need to agree with me that you can spend upwards of $175 and maybe even $225 before we should continue. If not, get the 5200Ultra and call it good.
Aside:What about the 5600Ultra, you ask? This is in the no-mans-land between economy and mid range, and there is not enough justification to buy it in my opinion. You do not get enough of a step up from the 5200 nor the staying power of the mid-range cards with the 5600Ultra and non-Ultra, so in my opinion either step up to the midrange or stay down with the 5200Ultra and spend a little less.
Now that we agree on this, what cards are in this range? You can get an ATI 9600XT, 9800 and 9800PRO in this range, and you can get the 5700Ultra, and the 5900SE/XT.
The 9600XT and 5700Ultra and very good competitors with the 9600XT getting the edge in most gaming demo’s. The 9600XT and 5700Ultra cards can be had for roughly $175-$200 depending on the boxed set and bundled software. Both of these cards are admirable performers, and in general can achieve the following:
Wings of Fury Demo: 150-180 FPS
Battle of Proxycon: 25-33 FPS
Trolls Lair Demo: 23-29 FPS
Mother Nature Demo: 26-36 FPS
I would recommend these cards if you have a upper end budget of $175-180. However, if you have a top end of $200, I would definitely recommend the 5900SE/XT. These cards are the 5900 Chipset paired up with a lower speed memory of 700MHz as opposed to the 850MHz of the 5900. Both of these cards have 256-bit memory interface and a GPU clock speed of around 400MHz. The 5900XT/SE cards can be had for $180-200, depending on the software bundle and manufacturer.
The 5900XT/SE can perform the 3dMark03 benchmarks in the following rates:
Wings of Fury Demo: 190-220 FPS
Battle of Proxycon: 30-40 FPS
Trolls Lair Demo: 27-34 FPS
Mother Nature Demo: 22-30 FPS
If you can take your budget on up to $220-225, I would recommend stepping up to the 9800 PRO. The 9800 PRO is a card by ATI which utilizes a full 8 pixel pipelines. This card is the mack daddy of the mid range market, turning in numbers for the 3dMark03 of the following:
Wings of Fury Demo: 220-245 FPS
Battle of Proxycon: 40-45 FPS
Trolls Lair Demo: 35-42 FPS
Mother Nature Demo: 45-50 FPS
As you can see, the 9800PRO and 5900SE/XT are the top of the midrange cards in performance. They keep your frames per second above 25-30, thus allowing you to notice seamless action while playing the games you choose. You can also turn up the antialiasing and anisotropic filtering to round out the images and make them appear more lifelike without suffering very choppy graphics and transitions.
This all begs the question, why are the 5900SE/XT and 9800 PRO in the same relative cost bracket as the 5700Ultra and 9600XT. Aren’t NVIDIA and ATI kind of cutting their own throats by having their own chips compete with one another?
Why should I buy now?
Consequently, the answer to both questions is the same.
To answer the first question, you would have to understand that NVIDIA and ATI are trying to unload the chips for the 5900 and 9800 currently. Both companies are working to release their next new chips in the next few months. In fact, NVIDIA’s newest board, the 6800Ultra, is already released for previews by certain websites. In preparation for release of the new chipsets, you first need to reduce inventories of the older chips. For that reason, both companies have chosen to pair the chips with detuned memory chips and reduce the core clock frequency and release them into the mid-range market. Why, you ask?
While the profit generated by each enthusiast board sold is very high, the volume of boards sold at the $400 price range is very small. Realizing the fact that many, many more people are willing to buy a mid-range board than an enthusiast board, the companies tuned down the graphics cards by detuning the core clock and dropping the speed of the memory. This means that the cores can generally be overclocked extremely well, while the memory is a mixed bag, depending on the technology utilized. Not only does the board outperform the 5700Ultra and the 9600XT out of the box, they are also ready for some aggressive overclocking to boot!
So why buy now? The answer to that is that more than likely the companies are planning to drop the inventories of the existing chips down and release the new chips. This will then see the end of the sales of the 5900SE and XT as well as potentially the end of the 9800 PRO. The fact that the pricing of the 5700Ultra and 9600XT has not been reduced at the same time appears to support this conclusion, as they do not expect the higher cards to stick around long.
Conclusion
I realize that not all people ascribe to the benchmarking setups to decide which card is right for them. However, whether or not you agree with the numbers and what they mean, the relative ranking is an indicator of relative performance of the card. You can get much better, smoother performance by taking your budget from the economy cards (less than $100) to the mid-range ($175-$225). However, you get very little noticeable performance boost by doubling this again to go up to $400-$450. The benchmark scores are much higher, but the human eye cannot really discern the difference.
This is applicable to today’s video cards, and within 6 months to a year this will not mean a whole hell of a lot. That being said, I thought I would let you all know of the opportunities out there for you today!
Right now you can get great performance from these cards and have a board built to last a few cycles and a generation or more of new games. I don’t believe you can say the same for the 5600Ultra and lower, and the pricing of the 9600XT and 5700Ultra is not sufficiently lower than the 5900SE/XT to justify them. The 9800PRO is priced somewhat higher than all of the others, but I think its performance and longevity justify this additional expense. My existing computer system has a 5900SE and my future system that I am buying parts for now will have the 9800 PRO, so I truly believe that these are the price/performance leaders!
Other Reviews of Interest
Gaming Computer Guide, Q1 2004
ATI 9600XT Graphics card review
eVGA.com 5900SE Graphics card review
2.8e Prescott P4 Intel Processor chip review
2.6c Northwood P4 Intel Processor chip review
AMD 2500 Processor review
I hope this review helps you choose a card, and if you have any questions, comments or clarifications, please leave a comment or write!
Jason
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