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robert Jung

I am not a high end user <g> In fact , I just recently upgraded to the following 2 year old computer bought from a friend:

Compaq Presario
AMD 64 3800+
1024 MB
GeForce 6150 LE

If I understand right, the 6150 LE is the weakest point in the system.

I've turned all the preference sliders off to the left and I'm able to crawl around SL but I stlill freeze up quite easily.

My Goals are:

1. to spend as little $ as possible
2. to get around smoothly with the sliders turned to the left
3. if possible, to get around smoothly with the sliders maybe as high as 50% ?

I'm looking at prices on Tiger Direct and I see:

GeForce7600 $34.99
8500 512MB $49.95
8500 1GB $49.99 including rebate
9500 512MB $ 49.99 with rebate

Will these cards do what I want?

thanks

Siyu Suen

Don't trust rebates, I've never actually been able to get one to work. If it's instant, that's ok and probably worth trusting, but any other "mail-in" or "buy something else" rebates tend to be traps to send you through as many hoops as possible to make you work for money they promised you.

I have an Nvidia Geforce 8400GTS, which serves me wonderfully and runs windlight with all of the sliders all the way up, and anti-aliasing at 8x perfectly smoothly. It's more than worth it for an 8500 512 imo.

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robert Jung

Thanks Siyu,

I know nothing of the quality of different brands nor do I understand the difference between 6600, 7200 8400 or 8500, or GS/GT.

Perhaps folks can help me decide between:

EVGA 8400 GS 256 MB $29.99
Diablotek 6600 512 $39.99
XFX 7200 GS $39.99
PNY or Sparkle 8500 GT $49.99

I am cheap! If the 8400 will do what I want for $29.99 then I'll go with that.

BTW SL is the only high graphic thing that I'm interested in. Mostly I just do text, * simple photo editing, and maybe a little U Tube once in a while.

Sansarya

I'm hanging in here with a Nvidia 6600 256MB card. It runs SL very well, it runs Windlight, my usual FPS is around 25-35 on empty sims, 7-12 when it's full. I can take great photos and turn all my graphics up for it. I have an occasional rendering problem when I wear clothes uploaded at really high resolution, but other than that it's a solid card.

*hugs* Flip (still got it! )

Siyu Suen

Actually, that's the one I have, I forget that it's my man's that has the "GT" after it. Yeah, the GS has served me very well for the past year and a half, and I paid $70 for it then. $30 is a great price, it's solid and runs other games well if you ever do get interested in them.

Beezle Warburton

With nVidia first number is "family," rest of the numbers are "grade"

For example:
7200 is near the bottom of the 7000 family.
6600 is mid-upper grade of the 6000 family.

I'd get the 8500. You get more shiny feathers than the 6600, and it's still good enough for most gaming.

I'd only get a 9500 or better if I had windows Vista -- the support for directX stops at version 9 in XP, which is what the 8000 series card supports, so a 9000 series card is just paying for features you may never see.

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Walker Moore

Be aware of the NVidia numbering system, and try to find articles comparing benchmarks of different Nvidia cards before buying. You might be surprised at the results.

Also, I'd stick another GB of RAM in that system if possible.

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Beebo Brink

SL runs best at 2gb of RAM (more than that evidently doesn't help). With memory fairly cheap, it's worth getting as much as you can afford.

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robert Jung

Thanks everyone

I've been looking at the Nvidia site and I'm beginning to get a a rather fuzzy clue. a comparison chart for cards currently selling under $40

model Texture fill rate Max Mem Bandwidth Memory size Direct X HDR Lighting

7600 GS 3.2 billion 12.8 GB/s 256 9c 64 bit
8400 GS 3.6 6.4 256 10 64

for $49 to $65 (depending on brand) you get

8500 GT 3.6 12.8 256 10 128


I understand that I'm asking a lot of questions, and I appreciate everyone's time. Can someone explain what the numbers mean, i.e., how do they affect the SL experience?

1. Texture fill rate: I assume that means how fast the bumps and the hair show up, but I'm thinking it has no effect on whether the computer freezes. I also assume there's not much difference between 3.2 and 3.6

2. Band width: Does this affect mostly the quality of the image, or does it affect whether I get frozen?

3. Memory size for all 3 is 256.

4. Does Direct X version 9c or 10 make any difference to SL?

5. Does HDR lighting 128 bit or 64 bit make a difference? My CPU is AMD 64.

The only big difference I see between these models is the bandwidth. I'm on medium slow DSL so I wonder if I would notice the difference?

Since I probably will want to increase RAM fro 1 G to 2G I'm currently leaning toward the 7600 or the 8400.

Thanks again.

Brave Republic

update RAM

Also when chjecking on video cards look at manufacturer's webpage to see minimum watts required for card. A lot of computers are built using bare minimum power source--or they just hose you and do that even if you tell them you plan future upgrades (thanks Dell you MF's )

You can open the case and see how many wats your PSU is Mine was only a year or so old and only 305 watts (just upgrdaed to Corsair 750w, Nvidia 8800GT and 4 g RAM (of which 3 to 3.4 g will actually get used).

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Ran Garrigus

Robert,

Second Life uses Open GL, so DirectX compatability is meaningless for it. HDR lighting is also unimportant for SL purposes.

See here for benchmarks of all three cards across various games and resolutions. For the most part, it seems to me that the 7600 GS is basically equivalent to the 8500 GT, and it's what I would recommend if you're absolutely sure Second Life is the most graphics-intensive thing you're going to be using on your computer.

If you may occasionally run DirectX 10 games or accelerated HD video output is useful to you, then got with the 8500 GT.

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scrim Pinion

best bang for the buck is almost always around $200, as far as gfx cards go.

I realize that's way, waaaaaaaay outside of your price range, though.

$100 is another good range, though. and for $100, you can nab an 8800GT 512, which is a mighty fine card.

if you go lower, I'd suggest an ATI 2600XT (with the GDDR3 memory), honestly. about $60, and a solid card. Couple bucks more will get you an 8600GT from nvidia (get the 256mb version - any more memory is largely wasted with the 8600GT).



All that having been said, I agree with the foliks above that more RAM is the choice to make, if you have to pick between the 2. you can get 2GB of ram for about 40 bucks these days, and it will do more for you than a new card will, I suspect, especially for the money you sound like you're willing to spend on one.

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Ran Garrigus

I think the RAM upgrade suggestions are perhaps a bit over-enthusiastic. It's true that upgrading from, say, 512 MB to 1024 MB can provide a big performance boost (it did for me!), but as noted by Linden developers, 1024 MB is the "sweet spot". More than that will get you significantly smaller gains, which is more or less what you see across most computing applications in the real world. I recall seeing a table once where going from 512 to 1024 improved performance in applications by as much as 50%, but doubling again to 2048 had maybe 20% improvement on top of that. Sure, there are applications where there's nothing like too much memory, but SL isn't one of them.

The 6150 LE is really old and outdated -- it's not even a card, it's an on-board graphics chipset, IIRC, which means that it's pulling texture memory from relatively slow system memory.

The upgrade to an actual dedicated graphics card with 256 MB of texture memory will be a much bigger step forward for his system than another gig or two of RAM.

Just to back this up with data, from here an AMD system with a 6150 LE chipset pulls a 191 score (yes, 191 -- three digits) in 3DMark06. The 7600 GS and the 8500 GT are in the 2200-2300 range. Maybe not literally ten times better, but close. See the Prey benchmarks on the next page (a whopping 4 FPS at 1280x1024) and compare to the 40 FPS the 7600 GS gets. It's no contest.

The 8800 GT, of course, is more like 11,000 or so in 3DMark06, so it's certainly worth the money ... but it's overkill if SL is the most intensive thing you're ever going to use the system for.

Beezle Warburton

Keep in mind that the power supply may need to be upgraded if you put a real video card in.

I'd get at least a 450W for an 8400 or better.

Ran Garrigus

The PSU suggestions are a good thing to consider. Doing a bit of research on the specs, I'm guessing the OP's compuer is along the lines of the Media SCenter SR2017 CL. That seems to have come with a stock 300W PSU. Anedoctal reports here suggest a 300W PSU will be fine for a 7600 GS, and in that case I suspect it'd be fine for an 8400 or 8500, but you should certainly double-check the power rating. A 250 W PSU may be cutting it close.

ETA: I wanted to see if I could find some solid 7600 GS power usage information, but no go there. I did see a post that the manufacturer recommends a 300W minimum, however. But also quite interesting was this post from someone testing their home system using a wattage monitor. On a desktop with a 7900 GS and roughly similar specs to robert's system, he peaked at 158W.

My usual suggestion in this case: buy the card and see how things go. If the system crashes or freezes a lot, and you've gone through the usual driver clean-ups and upgrades and so on to no effect, it's probably the PSU and then you can go ahead and replace that. The chances of causing any damage to your system because the video card is a bit too power-hungry is really very small.

robert Jung

My computer has a proprietary 300 watt PSU

The inexpensive 7600 I was looking at requires 400 watts (450 with SLI)

The $30 8400 works on 300 watts
There is one $50 8500 that also works on 300 watts

I know I look real cheap <g> but I'm trying to buy several different things, and if I shave $20 off each of them, my wife might let me buy more stuff ;-)

So, is the 8500 really that much better than the 8400?
This should be my last question - thanks everyone.

Ran Garrigus

Given what Siyu has said regarding the 8400 GS, I think it should do just fine for you.

I am very dubious about that 7600 GS really needing 400 Watts, but perhaps it's an overclocked edition.