Oblivion. quite a game by all accounts, when I fired it up though it laughed at my pc.
I suppose 3 years out of a 9600pro is pretty good going in the gaming world. So I tapped into the crosshatches knowledge of all things techy. Slim and lurk agreed that the at x800GTO was my best bang for buck solution.
Main bugbear is that my creaking system wasn't PCI-E compliant of course, so it had to be an AGP card. Kelkoo etc.. wasn't flinging up much in the way of bargains, but overclockers.co.uk had an AGP model which was spot on.
Was a bit surprised when the card needed hooked directly into the PSU mind you, but the 400w thing manages to handle OK.
£140 well spent.
My old 3dmark03 score was 3252 so tried the 3dmark06 and got 1395. But the thing was crawling, 9fps on first set of tests and last one didn't even register FPS's!
Still this score seems OK by the entered scores of other x800 owners, so I'm quite happy.
Nice to see oblivion noticed the new card and recommended "High" for all the settings. WoW looks much nicer too, but I'm looking forward to Ut2004/BF2 with it. The 9600pro really struggled on bf2 so I didn't really bother with it.
All in all chuffed to bits, big ta to Slim/Lurk on the advice. Sterling as always.
Saturday 1 April 2006
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Good job on the x800GTO.
ReplyDelete3Dmark is a funny old thing. I used to treat it a bit like a tech demo, something you ran to say to yourself "yep, that's what I paid for, a fairy flying in a forest with a lens flare" - only it gave you a score as well to quote at the l33t people.
I think it was either 3DMark03 or 05 when you installed the thing and unless you were running some bastard ninja £350 graphics XE SE Turbo 16-pipelines card then the test chugged along at 5fps. This is more of a stab in the eye than some candy on the eyes.
The 3DMark fuckers must be in league with the nVidia and ATI cartel. You know, the guys who have a secret annual conference where they scheme up ridiculous and unfathomable numbers and names for their range of re-released graphics cards (in such a way that there's no wya to determine what its real world performance will be).
Suppose I should try and get 3dmark03 and see how the score compares with the 9600pro. But end of the day it's a stonking machine now :)
ReplyDeleteOf course, by tomorrow it's outmoded.
So come on, some of you guys have ninja boxes. Give the public the scores on the electric doors!
3dfx Voodoo foreva!
ReplyDeleteI've been on an emptying wallet spree too. Wanted a widescreen tft for my .net development work. Picked up one of these from overclockers, but it had a dead subpixel so it's gone back on direct selling regs. Going to get another though. Of course this meant I'd need a card to run the big O at a decent widescreen res. Splurged on an HIS X1900XT, review here . Theres a nice auto-overclock thing built into the Catalyst Control Centre which bumped the memory up a decent amount & the core fatser than an XTX for 4858 3dmark06 points. I went for the HIS as it has a better cooler than the reference design to reduce the dyson factor. Just think, in 18 months there'll be something twice as quick, madness. Can't wait to get the new tft back :)
ReplyDeleteMust be something in the water...Stricken with a sudden overwhleming urge to "get with the programme, man", I reawakened my credit card from its slumber midweek and gave Overclockers some of my long overdue patronage.I started off sticking to my deep seated belief that a gentleman of my rank and standing should have "people" to assemble hardware these days, and initially snooped around the likes of dell. However, ten minutes sage advice in crosshatch had me down to first principles like a good self-respecting geek. Honestly, if I had abstracted this purchase down anymore, I would have taken delivery of a bucket of silicon atoms and a pair of tweezers this morning.The order consisted of:AMD Athlon 3500+ retail version;Asus A8N5X nforce4 motherboard;2Gb 3200 DDR RAM;Sapphire X1800XT gfx card;A Silentium case with Seasonic PSU;Can you say "box of skillz"? Assembly was relatively incident free, with only a frustrating 15 minutes with a jumper block, a discovery that ATX power has sprouted 4 new pins and a crash course in SATA connectors to act as speed bumps.And it runs fantastically. Oblivion looks awesome, and I have to confess that other than a quick reassuring look at HL2: Lost Coast, I spent most of the rest of the day running around the forest like a gay dryad, admiring the leaves and the foxgloves. Calloo-callay!
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