I think the point is that the 7950GX2 is a native DX9 card; anything from the 8000 series onwards is natively a DX10 card at the very least. I've never bothered trying to push my GTX 670; my i3 2120 CPU will always be a bottleneck (and I wish I could afford to get a Broadwell i5 and a LGA1150 board the moment the former comes out).

Lukeno94 wrote:

I think the point is that the 7950GX2 is a native DX9 card; anything from the 8000 series onwards is natively a DX10 card at the very least. I've never bothered trying to push my GTX 670; my i3 2120 CPU will always be a bottleneck (and I wish I could afford to get a Broadwell i5 and a LGA1150 board the moment the former comes out).

Ah.. sort of.. I've been exploring this for a long time and in my eyes "native Dx9" cards go up to the 400 series. Even though they technically do also support DX-10 and DX-11, the 400 series was the last gpu from nvidia to have a fast dx9 core, starting with the 500 series and onwards the newer cards got progressively slower at DX9 in general. At least that's what my friends report back to me from their 700 and 900 series cards.

This is really off topic though, so.. sorry about that, I'll end this here.

Lukeno94 wrote:

The HD3850 is a pretty decent AGP card, if you can find one.

Decent is quite an understatement. It is the fastest AGP card EVER. So fast that unless you
have one of those weird Core2 AGP boards the cpu will be the bottleneck.

I owned a system with a 3850 and a AMD FX-60 processor, the fastest socket 939 cpu. It
maxed out at 8500 points in 3DMark06. It is capable of 11000 points, but only with a
Core2 cpu.

9800GX2 with 1GB for my WinXP Core2Duo system. I have seen some tests for this card that beat my GT280 so I will test it to see if it will take over workstation and 'newish' XP gaming duties in my main XP rig.

Extron S Video Decoder boxes (got 2 of these)...I was planning to try these out to get a decent svideo signal from composite outputs from NES and other older retro consoles.

A GeForce 6800 Ultra AGP (I don't know if it is the Ultra extreme or just the Ultra...either way, this is the fastest AGP card I have that can run Win9x with a 6800 GT and some FX5950 Ultra's I own coming in second) - was thinking of using this in my constantly changing Win98 machine with a P4P800 ASUS board.

An Extron Matrix switcher for up to 16 inputs (and 16 outputs). Planning on using this for hooking up all my retro consoles and some older computers (i.e. Atari ST, C64, Tandy 1000, etc.). It takes pretty much any RGB input with the right cable of course.

With the exception of the 9800GX2 video card (about $20), I got everything for next to nothing and it is all fully functional (I haven't tried out the GX2 Card yet, but it was listed as working when I bought it).

That switcher is HUGE!

286 board with Simm slots and 12mhz amd processor and 8 isa slots.

I believe its an modulair circuit technology brand (that MCT stands for)

Nice board!

Got these parts for free!

And a Pentium 100.

n1mr0d wrote:

Decent is quite an understatement. It is the fastest AGP card EVER. So fast that unless you have one of those weird Core2 AGP bo […]
Show full quote

Lukeno94 wrote:

The HD3850 is a pretty decent AGP card, if you can find one.

Decent is quite an understatement. It is the fastest AGP card EVER. So fast that unless you
have one of those weird Core2 AGP boards the cpu will be the bottleneck.

I owned a system with a 3850 and a AMD FX-60 processor, the fastest socket 939 cpu. It
maxed out at 8500 points in 3DMark06. It is capable of 11000 points, but only with a
Core2 cpu.

In 2008 I went from an insanely expensive (because they didn't have them in the US) Gainward Bliss 7800GS+ (7900GT Core) AGP card to a much cheaper (and smaller) HD3850 for my Nforce3/Socket 939 4400+ setup and was blown away by the performance too.

well, the 7950GX2 still had issues, eventually after an hour it crashed, gave me a BSOD and proceeded with the problems before, even worse actually , as the glitches were worse , and Windows would boot even less often.

Eventually I thought "well if this thing is broken , then I might as well try something a little more drastic, the worst that happens is that the card breaks even more" .

So I disassemble the card and reapply new thermal paste to both GPUs . The old paste wasn't turned to powder, but it was caked on and rather dry (certainly not a paste , and it wasn't a good spread), I just used Arctic Silver 5.

so far it works (30 minutes beforehand it didn't work) , but I don't know, maybe its a heat issue?, but I will have to test it further. MSI afterburner gives me a temperature of 58 and 55 for GPUs 1 and 2 respectively while idle , and 72ish for both under load. I will give it a day to see if it crashes.

In other news I got a 300GB Seagate Cheetah 10k SCSI Hard drive, along with an adaptec 2100S SCSI controller card (had 32mb of ECC) SDRAM as cache, I replaced it with 64Mb ECC) . This will be going into my Athlon 1400 to replace the multiple drives I was using before.

Your best bet if the card acts up on other boards is to reflow or reball the card, Geforce 7 era cards get very glitchy overtime if they get too hot too often and even then act up at even low temps if the joints fail.

I once had two 7900 GTX Duo and a 7950gx2.

There was a laptop lying around on the scrap electronics trolley in the Chemistry department of my Uni a couple of days ago, but sadly, when I went back today, it had gone. It was a Windows 98 Advent laptop, in good shape externally.

nforce4max wrote:

Your best bet if the card acts up on other boards is to reflow or reball the card, Geforce 7 era cards get very glitchy overtime if they get too hot too often and even then act up at even low temps if the joints fail.

I once had two 7900 GTX Duo and a 7950gx2.

so far its ok , Im letting it run idle for a while before I do some more benchmarking on it.

Im going to assume that the disparity in tempratures between the 2 GPUs is due to one of them not having enough airflow by the design of it.

Not really, it's just that they'll be loaded slightly differently even at "idle", and temperature sensors often fluctuate around anyway. It's exactly the same for multi-core CPUs (my core 1 is 2-3 celsius cooler than core 2).

Lukeno94 wrote:

Not really, it's just that they'll be loaded slightly differently even at "idle", and temperature sensors often fluctuate around anyway. It's exactly the same for multi-core CPUs (my core 1 is 2-3 celsius cooler than core 2).

ah that makes sense . Im hoping this fixes the card as its a really nice card kind of surprising the thermal paste was in this state , I mean its not that old and it wasn't a cheap card, but I guess it can happen.

Artex wrote:

In 2008 I went from an insanely expensive (because they didn't have them in the US) Gainward Bliss 7800GS+ (7900GT Core) AGP car […]
Show full quote

n1mr0d wrote:

Decent is quite an understatement. It is the fastest AGP card EVER. So fast that unless you have one of those weird Core2 AGP bo […]
Show full quote

Lukeno94 wrote:

The HD3850 is a pretty decent AGP card, if you can find one.

Decent is quite an understatement. It is the fastest AGP card EVER. So fast that unless you
have one of those weird Core2 AGP boards the cpu will be the bottleneck.

I owned a system with a 3850 and a AMD FX-60 processor, the fastest socket 939 cpu. It
maxed out at 8500 points in 3DMark06. It is capable of 11000 points, but only with a
Core2 cpu.

In 2008 I went from an insanely expensive (because they didn't have them in the US) Gainward Bliss 7800GS+ (7900GT Core) AGP card to a much cheaper (and smaller) HD3850 for my Nforce3/Socket 939 4400+ setup and was blown away by the performance too.

I have that HD3850 AGP card to. But i dont like that cooler at all.. Its very noisy.

Darkman wrote:

ah that makes sense . Im hoping this fixes the card as its a really nice card kind of surprising the thermal paste was in this state , I mean its not that old and it wasn't a cheap card, but I guess it can happen.

I hope you're using older drivers too. I don't remember exactly what drivers are "correct" for the 7950 gx2, as it was a long time ago now when I was using one, but I remember trying one last year and I had to step back to some pretty ancient drivers to get it working.. the "newest" listed on nvidia.com website were giving me BSOD's and all kinds of headaches. Older drivers ran with no issues.

kithylin wrote:

Ah.. sort of.. I've been exploring this for a long time and in my eyes "native Dx9" cards go up to the 400 series. Even though they technically do also support DX-10 and DX-11, the 400 series was the last gpu from nvidia to have a fast dx9 core, starting with the 500 series and onwards the newer cards got progressively slower at DX9 in general. At least that's what my friends report back to me from their 700 and 900 series cards.

The 500 series uses the same "core" as the 400 series - both are nVidia Fermi parts. 😊

Quick'n'dirty web search and here's an example of GTX 580 and 480 in a DX9 game; 580 is (as expected) the faster card:
http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/geforce_ … _review,10.html

And other results:
http://www.hardwareheaven.com/2010/11/gigabyt … -sli-review/10/
http://www.hardwareheaven.com/2010/11/gigabyt … -sli-review/12/
http://www.legitreviews.com/nvidia-geforce-gt … d-review_1461/9
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeF … GTX_580/19.html
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeF … GTX_580/21.html

While I don't have a high-end Fermi card, I can tell you that my GTX 660 (which is Kepler based) has zero problems with any DX9 game I've thrown its way, and is consistently faster than my HD 4870X2 - it's "more faster" in DX10+ tasks, because that's where a lot of its optimizations lie, but it still does better in DX9 too. But I've never really thought about if an older (or newer) card could get me closer to a gazillion FPS in Quake 3 or Half-Life 2 or what-have-you; if I can turn up most/all of the settings and not have lag, I'm happy. 😎

Darkman wrote:

well, the 7950GX2 still had issues, eventually after an hour it crashed, gave me a BSOD and proceeded with the problems before, […]
Show full quote

well, the 7950GX2 still had issues, eventually after an hour it crashed, gave me a BSOD and proceeded with the problems before, even worse actually , as the glitches were worse , and Windows would boot even less often.

Eventually I thought "well if this thing is broken , then I might as well try something a little more drastic, the worst that happens is that the card breaks even more" .

So I disassemble the card and reapply new thermal paste to both GPUs . The old paste wasn't turned to powder, but it was caked on and rather dry (certainly not a paste , and it wasn't a good spread), I just used Arctic Silver 5.

so far it works (30 minutes beforehand it didn't work) , but I don't know, maybe its a heat issue?, but I will have to test it further. MSI afterburner gives me a temperature of 58 and 55 for GPUs 1 and 2 respectively while idle , and 72ish for both under load. I will give it a day to see if it crashes.

In other news I got a 300GB Seagate Cheetah 10k SCSI Hard drive, along with an adaptec 2100S SCSI controller card (had 32mb of ECC) SDRAM as cache, I replaced it with 64Mb ECC) . This will be going into my Athlon 1400 to replace the multiple drives I was using before.

On both of my GX2s, they didn't have thermal paste but thermal "pads" (my understanding is it's some sort of foam/cloth that's saturated with paste) - replacing it with AS5 greatly reduced temperatures, and neither seems to run as consistently hot as yours (roughly 10* C lower; my ambient temperature is around 16-18* C though, so that may be a factor). One thing I've found is that they need very good "side" ventilation - the exhaust direction from their fans doesn't go towards the back of the case (and if you have an OEM card with metal "spines" it will run hotter - clip that metal out and it should cool down). With that blocked I can get my cards running at 70-75* C too, but open that up (or even better, have an exhaust fan right over it) and they cool down pretty well. They're also notoriously finnicky as to what systems they'll work in - I don't think nVidia's HCL is also all that accurate, in my A8N-SLI Premium I still get random screen blackouts on start-up and when opening the drivers, and that board is on the HCL (I also know this isn't my card, because aside from having two of them that behave exactly the same, they don't do it on my non-HCL'd RDX200CF-DR (yeah, figure that one: the ATi chipset board does better than the nForce)). Drivers wise, I've tried the original 93.xx that did QuadSLI, the slightly-older 9x.xx that just supports the single GX2, and a very new 29x.xx build; the original QuadSLI drivers seemed the most stable/consistent in terms of minimizing random blackouts and such on the A8N, for whatever that's worth.

Of course it's entirely possible your board has something wrong with it, but I just figured I'd share what I've observed with mine. They're very odd cards indeed.

Oh, and to be more on-topic:

I received a 6800 Ultra of my very own today, but have only done very minimal testing (it booted up and ran Superscape and ASTRA); seems to work. Now just waiting on the motherboard to put it in (should arrive next week). 😀

@ RetroFanatic: If it's an EVGA, card, the EE PN are N346 while normal Ultras are N345. If it's another brand (I don't know if any other OEM did EE) I don't know about serial #s. "Vanilla" Ultra is 400MHz core, while the EE is 450MHz, so you can check once you're in Windows and have GPU-Z or some other application.

On the 9800GX2 - it will probably be faster in earlier games, but more shader-heavy games will probably favor the 280. The 280 also has the advantage of not being SLI, so in games where SLI doesn't help or causes problems it won't suffer. On the other hand, the 9800GX2 should do SLI-AA, which the 280 cannot (at least by itself). Based on the 7950GX2, it should do 8x and 16x modes (32x mode requires 4 GPUs afaik). Give this a look too: www.tomshardware.com/charts/2010-gaming ... d[4522]=on

Heat/power aside, it looks like a winner unless you're unlucky enough to hit upon a game that has problems with SLI. 😵

obobskivich wrote:

Oh, and to be more on-topic: […]
Show full quote

Oh, and to be more on-topic:

I received a 6800 Ultra of my very own today, but have only done very minimal testing (it booted up and ran Superscape and ASTRA); seems to work. Now just waiting on the motherboard to put it in (should arrive next week). 😀

@ RetroFanatic: If it's an EVGA, card, the EE PN are N346 while normal Ultras are N345. If it's another brand (I don't know if any other OEM did EE) I don't know about serial #s. "Vanilla" Ultra is 400MHz core, while the EE is 450MHz, so you can check once you're in Windows and have GPU-Z or some other application.

On the 9800GX2 - it will probably be faster in earlier games, but more shader-heavy games will probably favor the 280. The 280 also has the advantage of not being SLI, so in games where SLI doesn't help or causes problems it won't suffer. On the other hand, the 9800GX2 should do SLI-AA, which the 280 cannot (at least by itself). Based on the 7950GX2, it should do 8x and 16x modes (32x mode requires 4 GPUs afaik). Give this a look too: www.tomshardware.com/charts/2010-gaming ... d[4522]=on

Heat/power aside, it looks like a winner unless you're unlucky enough to hit upon a game that has problems with SLI. 😵

Thanks for the info...my plan was to use gpu z as you mentioned to figure out if it's the extreme 6800 that I have or not. Either way I think I'll be happy with it. Great to hear you picked one up too. What motherboard did you buy to use it in?

As for the 9800GX2. ..I figured that the dual gpus would give me some problems with some games from some of the reviews I have read but I am going to see what it can do with photoshop and autocad as well as with some older xp games. I do have 2 hd6870 s as well but I do prefer nvidia over ati for the most part.

obobskivich wrote:

On both of my GX2s, they didn't have thermal paste but thermal "pads" (my understanding is it's some sort of foam/cloth that's saturated with paste) - replacing it with AS5 greatly reduced temperatures, and neither seems to run as consistently hot as yours (roughly 10* C lower; my ambient temperature is around 16-18* C though, so that may be a factor). One thing I've found is that they need very good "side" ventilation - the exhaust direction from their fans doesn't go towards the back of the case (and if you have an OEM card with metal "spines" it will run hotter - clip that metal out and it should cool down). With that blocked I can get my cards running at 70-75* C too, but open that up (or even better, have an exhaust fan right over it) and they cool down pretty well. They're also notoriously finnicky as to what systems they'll work in - I don't think nVidia's HCL is also all that accurate, in my A8N-SLI Premium I still get random screen blackouts on start-up and when opening the drivers, and that board is on the HCL (I also know this isn't my card, because aside from having two of them that behave exactly the same, they don't do it on my non-HCL'd RDX200CF-DR (yeah, figure that one: the ATi chipset board does better than the nForce)). Drivers wise, I've tried the original 93.xx that did QuadSLI, the slightly-older 9x.xx that just supports the single GX2, and a very new 29x.xx build; the original QuadSLI drivers seemed the most stable/consistent in terms of minimizing random blackouts and such on the A8N, for whatever that's worth.

Of course it's entirely possible your board has something wrong with it, but I just figured I'd share what I've observed with mine. They're very odd cards indeed.

Im guessing the room temprature is about 20C. I will admit the case Im using this PC in isn't the greatest in terms of cooling. Im using a Cooler Master Wave case, exactly the same one as this case, but a solid black colour

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cases/2004/1 … 3/wave_master/1

it looks brilliant but the cooling isn't quite as good as on my Lian Li PC60 (there aren't as many vents on the front, and the fans are smaller, also no top fan unless I take out the USB bay)

that said its still a very good case, so I don't think it would cause a heat issue. One thing Im trying to do is get a hold of SATA hard drives & DVD drive, this PC has plenty of SATA ports but due to what I had laying around, I ended using IDE, not the best choice obviously.

and I think the earlier driver comment is true , Ive tried a bunch of drivers from the 93.xx to the much newer 301 drivers offered on EVGA's website (the card is an EVGA card) and the 93.81 seem to work the best in terms of stability , but I lost a big chunk of performance (the Doom3 benchmark lost about 15 frames) maybe I haven't got it set up right, dual GPU mode is enabled.

EDIT : Nevermind regarding the framerate, for whatever reason , reinstalling the drivers fixed that.

My case cooling isn't epic, but the GTX 670 really doesn't get that hot (particularly not in triple-fan Gigabyte form). I've never noticed it having any problems with a DX9 game, but then, it is so much more powerful than any DX9-era card that it really wouldn't matter!