Suggestions on Graphic Card Upgrade

[Burnt Powder]

Long time no see. How has everyone been?

Anyhow I have been up and down the charts over at Toms and cannot come to a conclusion. I have been out of the loop on desktop graphics since I built the system in my SIG.

Anyhow I am looking at buying something to upgrade my 8800 GTS (320MB) card. I am a gamer and never buy the latest and greatest cards.

I would like to keep it under $200 and am wondering what you suggest that ATi or Nvidia offers in that range that would be a very nice boost over my 8800 GTS (320MB)..........is there anything for $200 that would be a nice boost over my current card?

Anyhow thanks for any responses.

-bp

[jankerson]

I just got a XFX Radeon 5850 and it really kicks some tail.

Very quite, I can even hear the fan running at all and it's folding 24/7 at 100%.

The 5770 is also nice if you want to do one generation back.

[Burnt Powder]

How does the 5830 rate compaired to the 5770 and 5850?

Also, I see you did not suggest anything from Nvidia......any reason?

[jankerson]

How does the 5830 rate compaired to the 5770 and 5850?

Also, I see you did not suggest anything from Nvidia......any reason?

The 5830 seems to be right in line with the 5770, but much slower than the 5850.

No I didn't because I don't use Nvidia cards anymore and haven't for a long time now.

ATI is king now anyway.

[Ratt]

ATI is king now anyway.

What? Is that an April's fool joke?
Come April 12th a new king will be crowned and the status quo will be restored.

Anandtech review

I would like to keep it under $200 and am wondering what you suggest that ATi or Nvidia offers in that range that would be a very nice boost over my 8800 GTS (320MB)..........is there anything for $200 that would be a nice boost over my current card?

For your budget, I find it difficult to recommend an Nvidia card and I have to agree with jankerson to go with ATI unless you are willing to wait for Nvidia's lower end DX11 cards to be launched and you can still use your old card for Physx. Not sure if the 5XXX series have Physx support using unofficial drivers.

Since you are using a 1920 x 1200 monitor, I suggest saving up for an ATI XFX 5850 for $300 plus. It's higher than your budget but suits your monitor better. Way back in 1915 you can add another $150 and get yourself a Ford Model T or an ATI 5870 card plus some change today thanks to inflation. An XFX 8800 Ultra XXX cost me more than $900. Relatively speaking the current 5870 can be considered a bargain thanks to the competition between Nvidia and ATI.

I am a gamer and never buy the latest and greatest cards.

Don't worry. When the GTX 480 and the GTX 470 hits the market on April 12th, buying an 5850 or an 5870 card will no longer be considered as buying the latest and greatest.

For me, I'll wait for the GF100 gpu revision.

[jankerson]

What? Is that an April's fool joke?
Come April 12th a new king will be crowned and the status quo will be restored.

Anandtech review



For your budget, I find it difficult to recommend an Nvidia card and I have to agree with jankerson to go with ATI unless you are willing to wait for Nvidia's lower end DX11 cards to be launched and you can still use your old card for Physx. Not sure if the 5XXX series have Physx support using unofficial drivers.

Since you are using a 1920 x 1200 monitor, I suggest saving up for an ATI XFX 5850 for $300 plus. It's higher than your budget but suits your monitor better. Way back in 1915 you can add another $150 and get yourself a Ford Model T or an ATI 5870 card plus some change today thanks to inflation. An XFX 8800 Ultra XXX cost me more than $900. Relatively speaking the current 5870 can be considered a bargain thanks to the competition between Nvidia and ATI.


Don't worry. When the GTX 480 and the GTX 470 hits the market on April 12th, buying an 5850 or an 5870 card will no longer be considered as buying the latest and greatest.

For me, I'll wait for the GF100 gpu revision.

My 32" HDTV that I am using for my Monitor is 1920x1080 and the XFX 5850 kicks some serious tail, I can play my games at MAX settings no problem.

[Burnt Powder]

Hmmmm maybe I should bump my budget up to $300. It is not a matter of not having the $$$ it is just that I have never bought a graphics card at that price. There was always that $200 "sweet" deal out there.....

GF2 MX
GF3 TI200
GF4 TI4200
9700 Pro
8800 GTS

.....and so on.

[Mattacious]

If anyone is reading this can someone please PM Burnt Powder & direct him to this post... I can't PM anyone as I'm a new user.

Don't mean to hijack this thread, but I'm trying to contact Burnt Powder.

I have a P400 on the way, and notice in your sig you have it setup on Windows 7 64bit is that correct? Your the only I know who was able to do this lol. Just wondering where you got the drivers from as I intend to use it on the same OS.

My P400 arrives in a few days.. is there anything else I need to know about setting this up? Am real excited about it!

[Burnt Powder]

If anyone is reading this can someone please PM Burnt Powder & direct him to this post... I can't PM anyone as I'm a new user.

Don't mean to hijack this thread, but I'm trying to contact Burnt Powder.

I have a P400 on the way, and notice in your sig you have it setup on Windows 7 64bit is that correct? Your the only I know who was able to do this lol. Just wondering where you got the drivers from as I intend to use it on the same OS.

My P400 arrives in a few days.. is there anything else I need to know about setting this up? Am real excited about it!

Windows 7 (and Vista for that matter) have drivers built in for the Smart Array P400.

[Mattacious]

Cool, did you install any HP RAID tool applications as well?

I'm using SATA drives, heard SATA peformance isn't that great on this controller as it's only 1.5Gigabit

[Burnt Powder]

Have used SATA and the P400 w/ 512MB BBWC at work and performance is pretty good.

Once you get the OS loaded you can install these two things:

HP ProLiant Smart Array SAS/SATA Controller Driver for Windows Server 2008 x64 Edition

AND

HP ProLiant Array Configuration Utility for Windows

In the ACU I suggest you go in and set the following........

Controller Settings:

• Array Accelerator (Cache Ratio) - 50% Read / 50% Write (what I use most of the time but depending on what you will be doing with your PC you might want to adjust)
• Transform Priority - Medium
• Rebuild Priority - Medium

Array Accelerator Settings:

• Enable (disabling this will cripple your drives)

Physical Drive Write Cache Settings:

• Enable (disabling this will really cripple your drives)

[Mattacious]

Thanks. My motherboard detects the P400, I was able to press F8 & go into the RAID & setup RAID fine but when I exit & continue the usual BIOS start up it hangs at "Verifying DMI Pool data".

Or if I press Delete to go into the BIOS during boot, it enters BIOS then hangs.

Any ideas?

I've got Gigabyte UD3R (X86) Motherboard, i7 930 CPU, 3 x 2GB Kingston Hyper X. I've tried other PCI-E slots but no luck.

I tried the P400 in my old AMD motherboard, works fine, boots normally off the onboard SATA controller.

[Burnt Powder]

Sorry I have been MIA for awhile. Have you figured anything out? I honestly cannot think of anything. Let me know.