Need An "All Around Graphics Card" Suggestion

[Jim G]

Hi Guys --

I've been planning a new computer purchase, and I've been convinced by those who contribute to this site to purchase a Canopus A100 when I soon make the move in the video world. If, therefore, I do not need a high end AIW card, what do you guys suggest as a good all around card? I do a lot of word processing and some gaming.

By the way, I have been running an ATI Radeon 9000 Pro 128 and it has worked perfectly. But some people argue that the ATI Radeon AIW 9600 pro is worth the extra money even if I do not make extensive use of the video capture capabilities (given the Canopus). What do you guys advise?

[indolikaa]

I am a big fan of the Radeon chipset in general. I run the ATI AIW 9000 Pro and it's not just for the video capture. I'm actually impressed with it's overall performance.

Mind you, I don't run those games that suck the living soul out of a graphics processor. But I think you'd do just fine with any Radeon 9000 series.

.indolikaa.

[stiltman]

I am a big fan of the Radeon chipset in general. I run the ATI AIW 9000 Pro and it's not just for the video capture. I'm actually impressed with it's overall performance.

Mind you, I don't run those games that suck the living soul out of a graphics processor. But I think you'd do just fine with any Radeon 9000 series.

.indolikaa.

I have the same card as you, and I too do not do a lot of gaming. I love the card. I've have not had any problems at all. Setup was easy (downloadeed the newest drivers and didn't use the ones on the CD)

I only play 2 games and they are a little old, so I can't tell you how it preforms with the newest games.

Capturing is a cinch though, and I don't get any dropped frames on my OC P4 2.0

[indolikaa]

I only play 2 games and they are a little old

Solitaire and Minesweeper are hardly worthy tests of a graphics card.

I would like to point out, since stiltman did bring this up, my experience regarding dropped frames. I run an Athlon T-Bird 1200 and I don't drop frames. A P4 2.0 would be a huge step up from my processor. Just another positive for this card.

[Jim G]

Ok -- the vote is postive on the 9000 series. But what do you think of the ATI Radeon AIW 9600 pro? Do you think it is overkill given my future Canopus purchase?

[pixel]

I would definitely suggest a 9600 series card, be it the basic 9600, 9600Pro or 9600AIW.

I had been thinking about a new card and been looking around at benchmarks and every site said the 9600 Pro gave the best performance compared to its price, so I decided on a 9600XT and have one on the way!

If you plan on getting the Canopus, theres no point in gettin an AIW because many people have said that they find poor performance from an AGP capture card (which i have never found with my AIW 8500DV), also you'll save yourself some money.

The 9500 card is supposed to be better than the 9600, because it was made on a 9700 pcb which gives it better performance and even the ability to overclock the 9500 to 9700 speed. Although, you can't find that card in the UK and I'm not even sure it is manufactured any more due to the cost of the process for the chip and from what I've heard it wasn't exactly a cheap card anyway.

[rallynavvie]

The only ATi cards I use are on my Macs but I've never had any complaints with them. On my PCs I use nVidia cards since that's what I'm used to. My cards go through a variety of rigors such as gaming, video playback, video authoring, and graphic design. I just picked up a 5600 Ultra but it's having major conflicts with my dual machine so I may go back to the 4400 it had. I tried some things with the 5600 in my other PC and was very pleased with the results in gaming, but no noticeable difference in other apps (though I bet there's a way to get that nVidia hardware MPEG decoder to work with Premiere and Encore). I got the 4400 when it first came out and has been great ever since. I've overclocked it and seen some fantastic framerates in games. It's also put up with LONG hours of video authoring to two monitors. I did put an aftermarket cooler on it right away though since I knew I'd be overclocking it.

All my PCs are 4x AGP so I don't have the advantage of 8x yet (though I heard we can't even utilize 8x yet). I read some reviews on THG and saw that the 8x version of the 4200 is a very fast and reliable card that stacks up to the 9600 Pro. The 5950 is the 9800XTs competition and the two are almost equal. I would take either in a heartbeat though

[pixel]

rallynavvie, I don't really know much about the 4200, but the fx5600 and fx5700 in benchamrks have been slower in all round use than the 9600 Pro and XT, although the 5700 did win out on a couple of occassions, but only because of it's higher RAM frequency, although the reviewer in the test said the RAM on them got quite hot because nVidia needed more experience with that type of RAM. It was also said that the fx5700 used a lot of software optimisers, but still didn't help it out a lot.

And you are very right, there are no games that can utilize 8x AGP yet, so your 4x AGP systems will be fully capable of giving you the best performance from graphics cards for some time to come.

[Jim G]

Thanks guys.

But I have a further question. Do any of you agree with the comment made by Pixel, namely:

If you plan on getting the Canopus, theres no point in gettin an AIW because many people have said that they find poor performance from an AGP capture card (which i have never found with my AIW 8500DV), also you'll save yourself some money.

I've read some of the forums on this site, but by no means all of them. This is the first time I've come across the notion that an AIW degrades performance of a Canopus. This is not to say you are wrong Pixel. I'm a novice in this world of video capture. But I would appreciate it if anyone lead me to further discussions regarding this issue.

That aside, I read some very positive reviews of the ATI Radeon AIW 9600 Pro to the extent that even if you do not use the capture capabilities the overall performance and the overall package is worth the money.

Thanks again.

[pixel]

Sorry Jim G, I must have got my words mixed up.

What I meant is that some people say they find AGP capture cards aren't very good because hey think having the capturing function on it lowers the performance of the card so they say your better off with a seperate PCI card or another capturing solution, although I have never found any issues with my AGP AIW 8500.

It doesn't affect the Canopus at all. My bad if I gave you the impression it did.

As for the 9600 Pro AIW, if it's what you're looking for, get it. The XT only gives marginal better performance over it, but there isn't an AIW version of the XT. I know someone with a standard 9600 Pro and they think its a good card, and it is definitely worth the money.

[Jim G]

Thanks, Pixel, for the clarification. I'm still thinking it all through. I'm tempted to settle it all and get another ATI Radeon 9000 pro 128, it has served me so well thus far.

At any rate, thanks again for taking the time to respond to my questions. Have a great day!

[mujahid7ia]

If we can't take advantage of AGP 8x cards currently, then would it not make sense to buy one now if your mobo supports it? (ie, will we be able to take advantage of its speed and bandwidth soon?)

[pixel]

If we can't take advantage of AGP 8x cards currently, then would it not make sense to buy one now if your mobo supports it? (ie, will we be able to take advantage of its speed and bandwidth soon?)

All new graphics cards are 8x AGP anyway, and can run at 4x as well.

It's just the fact that no utilities or games run at a quility high enough to utilise 8x AGP, so people with 4x motherboards shouldn't feel pushed into getting a motherboard with 8x AGP just because they think it will run their 8x AGP graphics card any faster.

8x is relatively new in real world terms, so most people don't want to buy a new motherboard to support something that we can't make proper use of, or something which won't run well on an old system. e.g. I have a motherboard with 4x AGP in my P3 system, but an 8x card, but I wouldn't upgrade my motherboard because the P3 probably wouldn't even run fast enough for an 8x game anyway.

I don't know about taking advantage of its speed soon, but by the time we do take advantage of it there will be better graphics cards out (like the radeon 9800 will probably be obselete by next xmas).

I'm not saying there's no point in buying an 8x AGP card, the software we use just doesn't run any faster than 4x. I do hope we see 8x soon and it's good that we already have the hardware here for it to take advantage when it arrives.

EDIT:: I'm sure I read in a post concerning 8x AGP on here that 3D Mark 03 runs some of its tests at 8x AGP if your hardware supports it. But don't quote me on that. I think if you look you about you might find the post about this.

[indolikaa]

It's just the fact that no utilities or games run at a quility high enough to utilise 8x AGP,

I wondered about that.

[rallynavvie]

If the marks you saw where at THG the tests were run on a test card before release. With the latest international drivers the 5600 and 5700 are much faster. There are also massive heatsinks on every RAM chip on my card so memory heat will only be an issue with off-brands that don't have cooling on their memory chips. Easily solved with aftermarket ones though. The 5700 Ultra I picked up has the higher frequency RAM and the better PCB. PNY made a lot of changes to it from the plain 5600 that had been tested. What I don't like about the current lot of video cards is that every brand now has their own version with the same core as the others but different speeds of memory, bus, and other options so now one 5950 may not be as fast as another 5950. At least if you stick with good brands you'll be fine. The same can't be said about the ATi cards AFAIK, but that's a good thing.

The reason you won't need an AIW and a Canopus capture device is because it's redundant. Use your VGA card for video output and use your Canopus for captures. It uses a fantastic video codec and has locked audio input making out of synch issues a thing of the past. I think it works to output video to a preview monitor as well, though I use a seperate capture card for that (a Dazzle). This is handy when working in editing apps that allow preview monitors with it. You may need a FireWire card though as I don't think it comes with one.

[pixel]

Yes rallynavvie, it was a test version of the card I read the review on.

I am guessing that the drivers you were talking about are probably newer than the ones that were used in that test.

I didn't know most nVidia card manufacturers used different speeds of memory. AFAIK the only difference in ATI chipset cards is the access speed of memory.

I don't know how the software boosters for the fx series affect system performance, if they need a fast processor for it, or if they use the hardware on the card to run the software boosters.

With ATI it is basically all hardware, but the software boosters in the nVidia drivers seem to make good competition.

Each to his own

[rallynavvie]

For example the one I got has 800 MHz RAM but the other brand of card right next to it on the shelf used only 600 MHz memory. Also the core speeds were different, but only by like 50 MHz. I guess it is nice that brands compete to have the better card now, maybe it'll make them use better quality components.

AFAIK the FX engine does most of the computing mandated by the driver settings. It supposedly has an MPEG2 decoder built in so I'm hoping there's a way I can exploit that, like when playing back m2v streams in Encore. It should be a great card, it just doesn't work with my dual Athlon system at the moment

Which of the current lot of ATi cards have hardware MPEG decoders on them? Or maybe I should just use the Parhelia and forget gaming on that PC