OMG

http://cgi.ebay.com/ASUS-V9900-TD-FX-5800-128 … =item3a41e092f5

$429!!!! 🤣!!!

Yeah I wonder if the 5800 cooler was a quick last minute thing because it sure wasn't very well designed.

Of course some of the ATI cards like X850 and X1800 have a really annoying blower cooler too. They have redesigned them to be quieter these days though.

sliderider wrote:

OMG

http://cgi.ebay.com/ASUS-V9900-TD-FX-5800-128 … =item3a41e092f5

$429!!!! 🤣!!!

Oh dear. I think my "dreams" of a cheap 5800 may be unlikely at this point. 😁

The thing that was shocking was when you looked at the 9700pro and just how simple and tiny that cooler was. And the card was still heaps faster!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhHZpjpCVsE

The 9700 even ended up in notebooks (not sure if it had the same shaders and clocks though).

swaaye wrote:

sliderider wrote:

OMG

http://cgi.ebay.com/ASUS-V9900-TD-FX-5800-128 … =item3a41e092f5

$429!!!! 🤣!!!

Oh dear. I think my "dreams" of a cheap 5800 may be unlikely at this point. 😁

I was thinking that myself. The FX cards were so late to market and then the 5800's were quickly replaced so you probably will have a hard time finding one at all and anyone who has one probably knows they were only released in relatively small quantities.

Check this roundup out
http://ixbtlabs.com/articles2/over2003/

So the Radeon 9700 was in a dead heat with the 5800 Ultra but cost about 40% less. The core and memory clocks were 45% lower and it used the older DDR memory vs DDR2 for the 5800U. The only visible advantage from that table was the memory bus was twice as wide and that alone can't possibly account for all the performance. There must have been a lot more going on inside the core to account for the fact that they got equal performance from slower and mostly inferior components (apart from the core). On a clock for clock basis, the 9700 was actually going twice as fast or slightly more than that than the 5800U. nVidia not only fumbled the ball, they picked it up and ran it back into their own end zone.

What's also interesting to note here is that when you look at nearly all the FX cards shown, they all are poor values for the money compared to the comparable ATi cards as shown by the light blue bars.

Remember that R300 has double the pixel fillrate per clock of NV30. NV30 is a 4 pixel per clock design essentially whereas R300 is 8 per clock. Sometimes NV30 can do 8 but it's only when no texturing is happening and this obviously special case. Add in the +90% memory bandwidth and yeah NV30 was in trouble. This is probably why NV pushed 5800U so far to the edge with the clock speeds and that goofy cooler.

The 5200-5700 are really strange. Sometimes they are 4 pixel per clock but I think they drop to 2 pixels per clock in situations with DX 8/9 tech involved. So they definitely suck badly in a lot of games.

Also notice how 5200 and 5600 are quite similar in practice. I'm pretty sure that the chips used are more alike than they let on. NV was very quiet about details.

Cool review link, test bed is a P4 3.2GHz like I have, I just got it up and running with a 7800GT PCI-E 16x and 2 Voodoo 2's in SLI, Might have to bench some of those games and how much the 7800GT will crush those scores 😉

Also makes me want to buy a 9700 Pro to give it a shot. Never was a ATI fan. but maybe for some retro goodness for a another Tualatin build 😁

You can't really go wrong with 9700/9800. They deliver and they are very quiet. Also, their anti-aliasing quality is better than NVIDIA's until you get to GF8 and anisotropic filtering is great too.

At this point I would suggest a X800 though as they are pretty much the same thing but with more pipelines and clock speed. But AGP versions aren't exactly cheap anymore.

9700 has the added "collector's value" though of really being ATI's first undeniably excellent GPU. I mean it is a HUGE jump past 8500 in every way.

9700 is also the last AGP 2x compatible card from them.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

The 9700 even ended up in notebooks (not sure if it had the same shaders and clocks though).

Yup, and one of them still runs in mine 😉 I think the only difference is the clock - its only a tab bit slower then the desktop variant, and RAM (mine has 64mb instead of 128mb) but its still great nevertheless. Even better, it can be soft-modded in Fire GL T2 which offers very, VERY fine OpenGL performance. Some apps run better on my old laptop then on the new NV 355M w/ 1GB ram. 😅

That's awesome!

Funny you are mentioning Fire GL. I remember that on the Radeon 9500 and/or 9700 you could unsolder a resistor and solder it back on another spot and BAM you had a Fire GL card.

I actually did this for giggles and it worked! Device manager reported a Fire GL 🤣

Soft modding is obviously the better way. There was also a softmod for 9500 > 9700.

And once the 9800 was on the market there was all these cripples versions. Aka LE with half the shaders ot 64 bit memory bus...

Mobility 9700 is in between 9600 Pro and 9600 XT. It is based on RV360.

There's a Mobility 9800 that's based on X800 but only has 8 pipelines enabled. 😁 And those pipelines were unlockable with some modding. I think this came out before the desktop X800 was even out.

I think that R300 and R350 weren't really designed for notebooks and maybe lacked power management. Not to mention that they were 150 nm and big. Both RV3x0 and R420 were on the new high performance 130nm "low k" process and they had various power management tricks.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

That's awesome! […]
Show full quote

That's awesome!

Funny you are mentioning Fire GL. I remember that on the Radeon 9500 and/or 9700 you could unsolder a resistor and solder it back on another spot and BAM you had a Fire GL card.

I actually did this for giggles and it worked! Device manager reported a Fire GL 🤣

Soft modding is obviously the better way. There was also a softmod for 9500 > 9700.

And once the 9800 was on the market there was all these cripples versions. Aka LE with half the shaders ot 64 bit memory bus...

It's actually easier than that. You can flash the ROM on those cards between Radeon and FireGL and not have to solder anything. Some early nVidia GeForces could also be flashed to Quadros.

swaaye wrote:

At this point I would suggest a X800 though as they are pretty much the same thing but with more pipelines and clock speed. But AGP versions aren't exactly cheap anymore.

At one point some years ago, there was a very, very cheap AGP x800 AIW (all in wonder) on the market. I just checked ebay and there are still quite a few of them around. But if you go that far, I would still take GF 6800 AGP instead. NV was better option in that generation.

swaaye wrote:

You can't really go wrong with 9700/9800. They deliver and they are very quiet. Also, their anti-aliasing quality is better than […]
Show full quote

You can't really go wrong with 9700/9800. They deliver and they are very quiet. Also, their anti-aliasing quality is better than NVIDIA's until you get to GF8 and anisotropic filtering is great too.

At this point I would suggest a X800 though as they are pretty much the same thing but with more pipelines and clock speed. But AGP versions aren't exactly cheap anymore.

9700 has the added "collector's value" though of really being ATI's first undeniably excellent GPU. I mean it is a HUGE jump past 8500 in every way.

9700 is also the last AGP 2x compatible card from them.

X850XT AGP $49 shipped

http://cgi.ebay.com/ATI-Radeon-X850XT-256MB-A … =item19c31d08d5

Aside from the fact that you probably would not want to use it with that cooler on it (very noisy), that is a sweet card right there.

I haven't heard one myself but every now and then I come across somebody who really hated that blower. And the design is awfully similar to The Dustbuster.

The X800 XT had a nice quiet single slot cooler.

swaaye wrote:

Aside from the fact that you probably would not want to use it with that cooler on it (very noisy), that is a sweet card right there.

I haven't heard one myself but every now and then I come across somebody who really hated that blower. And the design is awfully similar to The Dustbuster.

The X800 XT had a nice quiet single slot cooler.

HD2400 Pro. $44.10, free shipping. NEW

http://www.pricefalls.com/products/256MB-Visi … 165/id/14896100

Cool site.

$10 more gets you a HD 2600 Pro 😁
http://www.pricefalls.com/products/Visiontek- … AGP/id/14901294

But 2400 and 2600 are pretty slow cards really... 2400 Pro is sort of the FX 5200 of the DX10 era. I am sure it is slower than a Radeon 9600 XT. It only has a 64-bit memory bus and pushes 4 pixels per clock. Ick.

The AGP card to have is probably Radeon HD 4670. But they are going for about double the price of the PCIe version and that's ridiculous. But one of these would dust any pre DX10 card.

I did some fun digging over at Beyond3D for FX hardware info.

Here is the gist of how the hardware works.

NV30 (5800):
3 VS, 4 pixel pipes, 4 ROPs
Double Z
pixel pipe = 1 FP32 ALU handling 2 TMUs + 2 FX12 Mini-ALU (each one can do 2 MULs or 1 ADD or 1 MAD)

NV35/38 (5900/5950):
3 VS, 4 pixel pipes, 4 ROPs
Double Z
pixel pipe = 1 FP32 ALU handling 2 TMUs + 2 FP32 mini ALU (each one can do 1 MUL or 1 ADD or 1 FP16 MAD)

NV31/34 (5200/5300/5500/5600) :
1 VS, 4 or 2 pixel pipes, 4 ROPs
pixel pipe mode 1 (4 pipes) = 1 TMU (+ 1 mini-ALU)
pixel pipe mode 2 (2 pipes) = 1 FP32 ALU handling 2 TMUs + 2 FX12 Mini-ALU (each one can do 2 MULs or 1 ADD or 1 MAD)

NV36 (5700):
3 VS, 4 or 2 pixel pipes, 4 ROPs
pixel pipe mode 1 (4 pipes) = 1 TMU (+ 1 mini-ALU)
pixel pipe mode 2 (2 pipes) = 1 FP32 ALU handling 2 TMUs + 2 FP32 mini ALU (each one can do 1 MUL or 1 ADD or 1 FP16 MAD)