Halo 1 & 2 for PC
This topic has moved here: Subject: The Buyer's Guide to Graphics Cards
  • Subject: The Buyer's Guide to Graphics Cards
Subject: The Buyer's Guide to Graphics Cards
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It's a selection in the menu called 'overdrive'. You can either enable or disable it. It'll automatically oc the card without overheating it. There's also some temperature guages you can see, too. If you really want proof, I'll do a print screen.

  • 01.22.2005 10:12 AM PDT
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huh

i dont see an overdrive tab.

oh i see why...

Q3: What products support ATI OVERDRIVEā„¢?
A3: Currently ATI OVERDRIVEā„¢ is supported on the ATI RADEON® 9800 XT and ATI RADEON® 9600 XT retail products. On the Graphics By ATI products supplied by ATI's Add In Board Partners the availability of OVERDRIVE is at the discretion of the partner. Please refer to the website of your graphic card manufacturer for details.

i pulled this from http://www.ati.com/products/catalyst/overdrive.html

apparently you must have the 9800 xt or 9600 xt or one of those other manufacturers boards that support it :( and mine doesnt (although its curious, i have all in wonder 9600 xt)

  • 01.22.2005 9:56 PM PDT
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Hmm, weird. I guess the reason the XT are a bit pricier is because of overdrive? It's not like a manual overclock. It pushes it as hard as it can go w/o overheating.

Try getting a third party program to manually overclock your card, then.

  • 01.23.2005 11:39 AM PDT
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i recent bought a 100 dollar Geforce FX 5200 256mb DDR for my halo pc, should that work well?

  • 01.23.2005 6:57 PM PDT

I see you guys know quite a bit about computers. I am getting a new computer and I was wondering if you had any suggestions for a new computer.

PS: I only got $2000 so everything needs to be under $2000.

Thanks,
Masterchief1990

  • 01.23.2005 8:12 PM PDT
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I still can't get custom edition halo since I installed my ATI x700 video card. I'm angry. Custom edition was extremely fun and now I can't get it to work.

About the guy who's getting a new computer:

All you really need is a fast processor (AMD 64/Pentium 4 at least 2 GHz), a PCI express (or AGP) slot, an ok sized hard drive (80+ GB) a decent amount of RAM (512+ MB) and a video card! All you have to do is just look around on the internet for good deals unless you're like Sexy Legs Davis and can build your own computer for an extremely low price. I suggest HP cuz they're cheap. And as for video cards, just look at this forum for people who have good video cards. ATI 9600 XT is supposed to be a good standard but I suggest the x700 cuz it's cheap and AWESOME. If you have a lot of money left over after you buy your PC buy the ATI x850. It's the best on the market, but not necessarily the best for your wallet.

[Edited on 1/23/2005 8:29:02 PM]

  • 01.23.2005 8:28 PM PDT
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Just like to add that whilst maybe a year ago the 9600XT gave the best bang for a buck (I got one, still have it) I'd suggest if you can afford it and you want value for money, the 9800 pro will give you more frames per second per pound/dollar, yeah, slower clock speed I believe, but double the number of pipelines, besides, I checked all the benchmarking tests on tomshardware when researching it.

Also, this guide is great and everything, but people really need to research before they buy themselves... its simply good to get into the habit, I simply divide the benchmarking results from www.tomshardware.com by the cost, or some PC magazines do it for you.

One other thing, another trusted manufacturer of ATI cards I recommend is Hercules, never had any problems with them, plus their cards are in a nice electric blue and the fan has a blue LED if you're into that kind of thing. Also, I got a fair bit of free software with my 9600XT, including a voucher for Half Life 2 (so its free to download from steam), I believe you get one with all last generation XTs (thats 9600s and 9800s)

Also, about pci-e... whilst I have no doubt it'll become the standard, please look at the very small performance gains to be had between AGP 4x and AGP 8x even today... I simply can't see many games making much of the extra bandwidth for quite a while... it makes sense... only flight sims truly need 256MB on the graphics card... and even thats not a neccesity....

  • 01.23.2005 9:54 PM PDT
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Examples for those concerned about AGP vs PCI-E:
Results from the Nvidia GeForce 6600 GT
Source:

| PCI-Express: | APGx8:
Memory Interface | 128-bit | 128-bit
Memory Bandwidth | 16.0 GB/sec. | 14.4 GB/sec.
Fill Rate (texels/sec.) | 4.0 billion | 4.0 billion
Vertices per Second | 375 million | 375 million
Memory Data Rate | 1000 MHz | 900 MHz
Pixels per Clock (peak) | 8 | 8
RAMDACs | 400 MHz | 400 MHz

The only real difference is Memory Bandwith & Data Rate.
Slightly faster, PCI-E should eventually replace AGP, but not today or tomorrow, prehaps in 2 years time, as some graphics cards are now starting to support PCI-E as there exclusive graphics bus. The difference is not wopping, but for the serious overclocker it can make a big difference. For good overclocking try the Nvidia 6800 ultra, it is really good and makes doom 3 look like a Pre-school drew the graphics, Not really ;), but it runs circles around quality and performence. 6800 Ultra is worth $1000 AUD. (Australian dollar)

By the way, the 5700 really sux, it couldn't hack halo, it would not stop overheating even with 2 systen fans roaring, it sadly got hit by a flying hammer by a certain somones rage (after breaking down of course) and now is shamly being filled in by a nvidia RIVA-TNT. (I dug it up while examining some 3000 year old egypt ruins. ;) It has an old xfx 5200 heat sink supa-glued to the GPU and that is being powered by a 6-volt battery, i feel like an idiot.
Will upgrade to the FX5700 LE this week, and continue my campain.
After heavily modding halo I.E: Making machine gun rocket launchers and fuel rod uzis the GPU decided life wasn't worth living, jumped the gun and over-heated it self. Now distorted graphics and crappy white lines replace all that was tranquile.

  • 01.24.2005 6:13 AM PDT
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Posted by: ThE_MarD
Heyyo,

Smurf... did you bother to read what davis wrote aboot ram? Most games nowadays don't even take up the whole 128MB, so 256MB isin't really needed right now. :p

As for vidcards? 6600GT is the best value for mid/high range videocards, and the 9600XT's the best for budget. ;)

He forgot 1 type of vidcard: intergrated. Intergrated is the worst ever. In common sense, it should be the fastest since it's intergrated and doesn't pass through a pci or agp bus, but an intergrated bus seems to be even weaker than those, so that's why if you have intergrated and no agp port? buy a new mobo. :p
I have an intergrated graphics card but i can play doom 3 just fine............for 20 mins or so.

  • 01.24.2005 7:28 AM PDT
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Whats all this negativity towards integrated graphics cards?

Surely it depends on the chipset used?

I don't think integrated graphics cards are inherently bad, its just that there are alot that simply use some weird intel gpu that doesn't support DirectX 9... I think the 9600 mobile gpus are perfectly fine, and whilst not as good as their AGP counterparts aren't as -blam!-e as people say they are... MEH!

  • 01.24.2005 11:45 AM PDT
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For Graphics cards I would recommend the 6800 GT for a high end card, then the 6800, if you can fiind it for $250 or so, for a midrange card, and then the 9600 pro for low end. I would not recommend the 6600 GT if you could find the 6800 for $50 or so more, the 6600 GT only has 8 pixel pipelines clocked at 500 mhz, the "vanilla" 6800 as we call it has 12 pixel pipelines clocked at a meager 325 mhz. The 6600 GT has a fillrate of 4000 MTextels/sec, versus the 3900 MTextels/sec the 6800 has, but if you are lucky and get a good 6800, you can unlock the extra 4 pixel pipelines the 6800 GT and Ultra have, and overclock it a good 50 to 75 mhz. With a 50 mhz overclock and the full 16 pipelines you get 6000 MTextels a second versus the 4000 the 6600 GT has. If you do not want to try unlocking the 6800 though you could still overclock it to exceed to 6600 GTs speed. If you can't find a 6800 for less than $50 more than the 6600 GT, unless you are going to try to unlock the extra pipelines, I would stick with the 6600 GT.

  • 01.24.2005 12:29 PM PDT
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From what I've heard, ATI's are better than nVideas. nVideas require a seperate power cord type thing or something. I don't really know whether there is a difference between ATI and nVidea or whether nVidea cards really need their own power supplies, it's just what I've gathered from reading threads on this forum.

  • 01.24.2005 5:37 PM PDT
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Posted by: GreenxPanda
From what I've heard, ATI's are better than nVideas. nVideas require a seperate power cord type thing or something. I don't really know whether there is a difference between ATI and nVidea or whether nVidea cards really need their own power supplies, it's just what I've gathered from reading threads on this forum.


Eh?

Why does it matter if you need to attach an extra molex to the graphics card?

You should really go by benchmarks versus price... or just benchmarks if you're loaded.

  • 01.24.2005 7:48 PM PDT
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What's a molex? But I'm just saying that that's what I have gathered from everything that I've read on this forum. nvideas could be better for all I know...

  • 01.24.2005 8:32 PM PDT
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You know that problem I was having with custom edition? Well I had to reinstall Halo PC because I accidentally added these maps to Halo PC well that's not the point, now Halo PC won't work. It does the exact same thing as Custom edition does. The screen flashes from only the backlight being on to NO SIGNAL and back and forth until it says, "A problem occured while initializing something something DirectX9.0" I have 9.0c and it says hardware acceleration may be disabled. Well now, not only can I not play Halo CE, I can't play PC which I paid $30 for and now I am extremely angry. Could someone PLEASE help me?!?!?!?!

  • 01.24.2005 10:02 PM PDT
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hey I don't know if you have the answer to this? -- I have an ati x600 and halo pc works fine - but and there is always a big but - halo ce asks me to activate direct draw even though this is on and works for the halo game - just want to know really is there anything that is really different between the two types of halo and why does one work and the other not please let me know asap

Thanks

  • 01.25.2005 8:16 AM PDT
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Posted by: GreenxPanda
What's a molex? But I'm just saying that that's what I have gathered from everything that I've read on this forum. nvideas could be better for all I know...


A molex is simply a 4-plug power connector. Pretty much every PC power supply has them. On the contrary, ATI's use them as well. The only exception is the x700 and 9600XT and below. Otherwise, ATI uses the extra power.

I have always been an ATI guy. I've never had a good experience with Nvidia, although their prices are pretty low right now. 6600 series are a really good deal for what you get.

  • 01.25.2005 3:15 PM PDT
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Ok. Well I'm sorry if what I said was wrong that's just what I thought.

  • 01.25.2005 7:20 PM PDT
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Hi ho, I'm new here, so please be gentle...


I have a Radeon 9700 Pro 128 mb, and have no complaints. This is my first ATI after owning two nVidia's, a GeForcre 2 32 mb and a Gefore 4 with 64 mb- I still have both cards and they still both work, though they're failings are more due to not supporting DX 9 or Shader 2.0 (3.0?). And I have a Radeon 9200 128 mb in a media PC my wife and use.

Personally, a lot of the rags (PC Gamer, Maximum PC, CG, etc.) tend to go with ATI, but I have found since both companies release roughly comparable cards at each price point, you aren't going to lose out with either/or that much. I went with ATI this time around because nVidia purposely fudged their benchmark tests when the 5000 series were just being released to make their cards look better.

Personally, the competition between ATI and nVidia benefits us most, because it drives research and prices go down.

I haven't been keeping up with nVidia's tech, so I can't make any hard reccomendations there. The Radeon 9600 XT is a good mid level card, the 9800 is essentally a faster 9700 (faster core speed), and the 800 and 850 XT's are the top of the line for gaming, AFAIK.

I didn't read all of the messages, but the problem with an integrated video is Ihae neer been able to figure out what is supported by them and what isn't, i.e. pixel shaders, what release of DirectX they can handle, etc. Mostly, though, they share system RAM, which is bad for two reasons. System RAM is slower than video RAM, and it means less memory for whatever programs you're running. My wife had an 700 Mhz HP POS that couldn't run Unreal Tournament while my old 200 Mhz with an 8 meg Voodoo 2 card ran it just fine.

And for whoever had $2000 to spend on a PC- you could put together a smoking rig for that kind of cash, as long as you don't buy a name brand PC, but instead buy name brand parts, i.e. Asus/Gigabyte mobo, Kingston/Crucial RAM, Sony/Plextor DVD drive, Maxtor/Western Digital hard drive, etc. and build it yourself or get someone to do it for you.

  • 01.26.2005 6:39 AM PDT
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Good insight. It's true that if ATI and Nvidia did not compete to the level at which they do (every month pushing to have the fastest card), we would be a few years behind where we are now.

If you play games that use Direct-3D like Far Cry and Half Life 2, ATI cards are better since they are based on that system. If you play Doom 3, though, Nvidia cards will perform a bit better since OpenGL is used. However, the cards can crossover on games so there aren't any nasty roadblocks...

Ahh yes, the good ol' 9600XT. It suited me quite well. It still handled Half-Life 2 on maximum settings with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering set at 4x. It still works nicely on my downstairs computer.

Integrated graphics...ugh, what can I say besides...you're right, the shared RAM as well as other issues and unknowns (direct 3d or opengl...which dx version?) make them undisireable compared to an actual card.

$2000 for a pc is if you go to Dell, Gateway....even more if you buy (looks around for any listeners...) [whisper]Alienware[/whisper] :o

I spent about $1100 on my pc:

Athlon 64 3500 (overclocking to near 4000)
Abit AV8 Socket 939 motherboard
1GB Corsair DDR400
Western Digital Raptor 10K rpm 74GB SATA
NEC 16x Dbl-layer DVD+/- RW
Gigabyte X800XT AGP 8x

Kick @ss for under $1200.

  • 01.26.2005 9:36 AM PDT
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Thanks!

I did my current system for a lot less than a thousand bucks. I already had my case, sound card, etc. so it was nicely cheap. I probably won't upgrade again until BTX mobos and cases are a little more common. Plus Intel and AMD are releasing dual core CPUs this year or early next, so I wanna see what they're all about. That, or it'll drive the prices of current CPUs down.

Also, RAM is expected to get much cheaper, which will drive the costs of new RAM down, and likely of the stuff used on video cards, so we win again.

My current System:

AMD Athlon 2800+
MSI K6V nForce 2 mobo
2 sticks of Kingston PC 3200 DDR 400 Mhz RAM
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro
Sound Blaster 512 Live! Value (an old card, but it works)
1 WD 250 ATA 133 HD
1 WD 60 GB ATA 100 HD
1 Plextor PX-712A DVD burner
1 Sony 712A DVD Burner
D-Link Wireless ethernet card
19" View Sonic Monitor (soon to be a 22" LG LCD!!!)
DigiBoard 3 Firewire 200 Card

I do a lot of video editing and effects on my PC, and it handles it quite nicely. It doesn't run Doom 3 all that well, but good enough to play. Half-Life 2 ran smokingly on my system, and Halo is just fine.

If I had done more research, I wouldn't have gone for the MSI board, instead a Gigabyte or an Asus might have been better. As good as the nForce 2 stuff is, it messed up my Sony DVD drive badly.

  • 01.26.2005 10:29 AM PDT
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My next PC will be custom built for sure. I thought that doing that would cost tons but if it's as cheap as you say it is I' definitely going to do that.

  • 01.26.2005 12:12 PM PDT
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What is an ATI X700 - never heard of it before.

  • 01.26.2005 2:53 PM PDT
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It's a mid-ranged graphics card.

Will this RAM work on my computer?
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?id=1061769820666& skuId=5990591&type=product

Here's my memory specs:

Memory Installed
512 MB (2 x 256MB)

Maximum allowed
4 GB (4 x 1GB) requires the replacement of the installed 256 MB DIMMs

Speed supported
PC3200 MB/sec

Type
184 pin, DDR1-400 SDRAM

DIMM slots
Four

Open DIMM slots
Two



[Edited on 1/26/2005 8:32:32 PM]

  • 01.26.2005 3:20 PM PDT
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Yes.

  • 01.26.2005 8:54 PM PDT