Video card questions

[Cobalt]

Basically I want a bit more graphical power from my machine. Currently, I've got an ATI Radeon X1800 with 256. I've wondered if the simple plan would be add a second one. Trouble is I can't seem to find that listed on its own without some string of letters behind it.

Then there's a multitude of 512 cards (I'm sticking with ATI) but they cost...a lot.

Any thoughts on this? Advice, ideas?

[shadron]

It's not clear here what you are trying to do. A second video card will not make the first card run any faster; all you can do with a second card is replace the first, which may make your video faster if the second card is more powerful, or use both to drive two separate monitors. This may be doable, but I think you need to have two very much identical cards (or a single "double-header" card) to make that work; that's a limitation of Windows.

The 256 and 512 numbers are the amount of video memory resident on the card, in this case they are in megabytes. The thing about memory is that if you don't have enough to meet the demand of the program that is using the video then your program will fail in any of several ways - blue screen, freeze, blank black screen, simply fail to run, and so on. If you have enough, it will work, and more than enough won't buy you anything additional from that program's video performance.

About the only recourse you have to make video run faster is to upgrade your video card to one that has a more powerful video processor, the whole-cloth approach. Nothing else will really help you.

Make sure that your Active-X installation is at the latest revision (10.0 for Vista, 9.0c for Windows NT through XP). Make sure you have the latest revision of video driver for your card. Run ATI's CATALYST and tweak as it suggests. That's about all you can do.

[gumboot]

It's not clear here what you are trying to do. A second video card will not make the first card run any faster; all you can do with a second card is replace the first, which may make your video faster if the second card is more powerful, or use both to drive two separate monitors.


If he has already got (or gets) an X1800 Crossfire edition he can slave the regular card to the Crossfire card and have two cards processing the data for a single output.

[Cobalt]

If he has already got (or gets) an X1800 Crossfire edition he can slave the regular card to the Crossfire card and have two cards processing the data for a single output.

This sounds like what I want to accomplish.

[rehn]

Make sure that your Active-X installation is at the latest revision (10.0 for Vista, 9.0c for Windows NT through XP). You mean Direct-X, don't you ??
Rehn

[shadron]

If he has already got (or gets) an X1800 Crossfire edition he can slave the regular card to the Crossfire card and have two cards processing the data for a single output.

I went and looked, and you're right; that's new technology to me. Tip of the hat.

Do have fun, Cobalt. Let us know how it turns out.

You mean Direct-X, don't you ??

Right you are. Looks like time to retire.

[four elevener]

You would also have to get a motherboard that supports Crossfire (if you don't have one already), and it will only work if your card is a PCI express card.

[WildCat]

There are some good cards out there for under $100, just read some review sites. Most want a PCI-E slot these days though, AGP slots went the way of ISA.

[big-E]

It's not clear here what you are trying to do. A second video card will not make the first card run any faster; all you can do with a second card is replace the first, which may make your video faster if the second card is more powerful, or use both to drive two separate monitors. This may be doable, but I think you need to have two very much identical cards (or a single "double-header" card) to make that work; that's a limitation of Windows.

The 256 and 512 numbers are the amount of video memory resident on the card, in this case they are in megabytes. The thing about memory is that if you don't have enough to meet the demand of the program that is using the video then your program will fail in any of several ways - blue screen, freeze, blank black screen, simply fail to run, and so on. If you have enough, it will work, and more than enough won't buy you anything additional from that program's video performance.

About the only recourse you have to make video run faster is to upgrade your video card to one that has a more powerful video processor, the whole-cloth approach. Nothing else will really help you.


Shadron, I'm guessing you're not a PC gamer :-) What you say is true enough for applications, but as others have posted, games make special demands on video hardware, and can indeed use multiple graphics cards, in parallel, to the absolute maximum of their onboard processing, memory and bandwidth. You can actually have 3 or even 4 cards in parallel if you have the right Crossfire setup. SLI from Nvidia is pretty much the same thing in a different, incompatible format.

Won't make any noticeable difference for normal applications though, and can actually make performance decrease in some cases if the game or application isn't able to take advantage.

Cobalt:
As Gumboot says, assuming you currently have a standard X1800 you would need to get another X1800 in "Crossfire Edition" with a dongle to attach the two cards together... all a bit old-tech now.

Main questions are what budget you have, what level of performance you are after, for what purpose (i.e. running the latest games at maximum detail levels, or not so much) - and what motherboard and processor you have, as they will affect what you can or should use. I'm fairly sure you must have a PCI-e motherboard as I don't think the X1800 came in AGP, so you should have plenty of choice.

As quite a keen gamer I am willing to pay fairly large, but not ridiculous sums for graphics cards - there's a sweet spot on the bang-per-buck curve at around $150 US, say a Radeon HD4850 512MB. Is that what you would consider to be costing 'a lot'? I don't think it would work in Crossfire with your X1800 though, at least not very well given the large difference in performance, but it will probably outperform a pair of X1800s anyway, and provide a more than acceptable performance in pretty much any game as long as you aren't chasing ludicrous levels of detail and framerate.

Crossfire works best with identical cards, and works well enough with similar but not quite identical cards, but newer cards will be Crossfire X which won't be compatible with earlier versions...

It is a bit of a nightmare, to be honest. I'm not sure how long the market can go on making it more and more complicated to know what you should buy...

[Sunstealer]

I used to run an X1800XT - good card once a quiter cooler was fitted. An X1800 (XL or XT) is quite old now. Getting another one will be very difficult and making it into a crossfire setup is not going to give you the same amount of graphics-power as a mid-range, modestly priced, brand new, single graphics card. Also X1800s do require alot of power to run so two in tandem might tax your power supply.

Look for some of the mid-priced Ati card as they seem to be the sweet spot. Whilst I don't normally us Tomshardware they do have some decent graphs that give you a reasonable indication of different set ups.

X1900XT was very similar to a X1800XT so look at X1900XT crossfire results (denoted by "CF" in the charts"). This will give you a benchmark as to the performance you would expect with 2x X1800s. Then look at the cards above this and see how much they cost. You'll be pleasantly surprised.

e.g. HD4850 (see bigE's post) is leaps and bounds ahead of 2x1800s.

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/charts/gaming-graphics-charts-q3-2008/benchmarks,30.html

[a_unique_person]

Don't forget your power supply. One of the biggest power users on a PC is a high performance graphics card. Add a second one and you may overload it. A good quality power supply that can actually supply it's specified power rating for a sustained length of time (as opposed to a 450W power supply that will supply 450W for a few seconds), is fairly expensive.

[Gate2501]

Don't forget your power supply. One of the biggest power users on a PC is a high performance graphics card. Add a second one and you may overload it. A good quality power supply that can actually supply it's specified power rating for a sustained length of time (as opposed to a 450W power supply that will supply 450W for a few seconds), is fairly expensive.

This is very important.

I have 2 Geforce cards in an SLI configuration inside my machine, they were annhialating my 650 watt supply, so I had to upgrade to a 1k watt.

Also it only had one 8 pin connector and I needed 2. Luckily I found a pinout for the 8 pin online and crudely fashioned one out of an unused 6pin(because the extra 2 pins on the 8 were just grounds).

Make sure you have the wattage and connectors first.

Save yourself a headache.

[PixyMisa]

A single current mid-range card is likely to beat two X1800's in almost any benchmark. The 4850 is a great card, I have one myself. If you're on a tight budget, the 4830 delivers 80% of the performance for 60% of the price (about $90 if you shop around, vs about $150) which makes it a steal.

[shadron]

Shadron, I'm guessing you're not a PC gamer :-)

Yeah, that's right - I should have known better than get involved. :)

I have programmed openGL and Direct-X apps, mostly in architecture and 3D rendering. The aim there is more accuracy than speed, though speed is not shunned; it's just secondary.

[This Guy]

I went and looked, and you're right; that's new technology to me. Tip of the hat.

Do have fun, Cobalt. Let us know how it turns out.

Right you are. Looks like time to retire.

Naa, not time to retire. You just learned something new!

I always learn something new as I pull my foot out of my mouth! ;)

My opinion is, it's OK if I make an ass of myself, if I learn something, and at least one other person gets a good laugh out of it :D

[Cobalt]

As Gumboot says, assuming you currently have a standard X1800 you would need to get another X1800 in "Crossfire Edition" with a dongle to attach the two cards together... all a bit old-tech now.

Main questions are what budget you have, what level of performance you are after, for what purpose (i.e. running the latest games at maximum detail levels, or not so much) - and what motherboard and processor you have, as they will affect what you can or should use. I'm fairly sure you must have a PCI-e motherboard as I don't think the X1800 came in AGP, so you should have plenty of choice.

As quite a keen gamer I am willing to pay fairly large, but not ridiculous sums for graphics cards - there's a sweet spot on the bang-per-buck curve at around $150 US, say a Radeon HD4850 512MB. Is that what you would consider to be costing 'a lot'? I don't think it would work in Crossfire with your X1800 though, at least not very well given the large difference in performance, but it will probably outperform a pair of X1800s anyway, and provide a more than acceptable performance in pretty much any game as long as you aren't chasing ludicrous levels of detail and framerate.
That seems like what I'd want as far as a single card. Basically I want to run Fallout 3 and other newer games on something higher than "Medium" or "Low." I get very odd issues when I set the texture quality to "high," even without bilinear filtering and such. But HDR seems to be no problem. Go figure. (Great game, on an unrelated note.)

There's no budget as of now, it's more of a plan for the future.


A single current mid-range card is likely to beat two X1800's in almost any benchmark. The 4850 is a great card, I have one myself. If you're on a tight budget, the 4830 delivers 80% of the performance for 60% of the price (about $90 if you shop around, vs about $150) which makes it a steal.

I'll have to look into this too.

[Macgyver1968]

Basically I want a bit more graphical power from my machine. Currently, I've got an ATI Radeon X1800 with 256. I've wondered if the simple plan would be add a second one. Trouble is I can't seem to find that listed on its own without some string of letters behind it.

Then there's a multitude of 512 cards (I'm sticking with ATI) but they cost...a lot.

Any thoughts on this? Advice, ideas?

I recently purchased a Radeon HD 4670 for a secondary machine for about $75 It's a budget card, but has some great specs. It runs 2 instances of my online game with no problem. 1 gig of DDR3 and it clocks pretty fast.

http://www.guru3d.com/article/ati-radeon-hd-4670-review/

1 GB version of the Radeon HD 4670 will be released as well with a 750 core clock frequency and 1800 MHz GDDR3 memory

That's the one I got for the same price...but mine clocks the memory at 2000 Mhz...and you can overclock it.

[shadron]

Naa, not time to retire. You just learned something new!

I always learn something new as I pull my foot out of my mouth! ;)

My opinion is, it's OK if I make an ass of myself, if I learn something, and at least one other person gets a good laugh out of it :D

Well, I hope that was true.

BTW, retire meant to to bed, at least in his case at this time. :)

[Macgyver1968]

It runs 2 instances of my online game with no problem.

I just realized...that sentence tells a lot about me :)

[PixyMisa]

A single current mid-range card is likely to beat two X1800's in almost any benchmark. The 4850 is a great card, I have one myself. If you're on a tight budget, the 4830 delivers 80% of the performance for 60% of the price (about $90 if you shop around, vs about $150) which makes it a steal.
Looks like Newegg were having a sale on 4830's when I checked the price - the cheapest one is now $100 before rebate. Still good value, though.

[a_unique_person]

I just realized...that sentence tells a lot about me :)

You use sockpuppets? :boxedin:

[-Axiom-]

If you want to play some of the recent games available the minimum you should be looking at is a 4850 or a gtx 260, IMO.
Anything less will start to show its age rather quickly.
The performance that you get for $150-$180 is very good.

If your computer is OEM (Dell, Compaq, etc.) chances are that you won't be able to do crossfire with the current psu.
The chances of finding a crossfire edition of the x1800 are rather slim.

The above link to Tom's Hardware guide is an excellent resource for choosing a video card.
It really comes down to how much you are willing to spend.
Use Tom's guide, video card nomenclature is very confusing nowadays, even for people that are into this type of stuff.

[Cobalt]

I just realized...that sentence tells a lot about me :)

What's your game of choice?

[gumboot]

I have a GForce 8800GT, which was fairly cheap to get, and it runs Crysis in full detail at 1680x1050 without batting an eyelid. My friend had the same set up as me but replaced it with a slightly cheap Radeon that runs even better.

Granted I also have a Quad Core and 4GB of RAM.

[Sunstealer]

This is very important.

I have 2 Geforce cards in an SLI configuration inside my machine, they were annhialating my 650 watt supply, so I had to upgrade to a 1k watt.

Also it only had one 8 pin connector and I needed 2. Luckily I found a pinout for the 8 pin online and crudely fashioned one out of an unused 6pin(because the extra 2 pins on the 8 were just grounds).

Make sure you have the wattage and connectors first.

Save yourself a headache.OK I'm going to kill the wattage myth right here and now.

A 650W PSU with good amperage on the 12V rail(s) will power just about anything including 3 graphics cards. A 1K PSU is so laughably stupid because you need to be running huge amounts of equipment to need one.

Wattage is not the be all and end all for PSUs. The number of Amps on the 12V rail(s) is the crucial number to look at. Cheap PSUs with high wattage "rating" are worse than low wattage well made PSUs.

Bottom line is the most important component in any PC is the PSU. You don't need big watts, you need a brain, a quality make with good amperage on the rails to power what you require. Don't get sucked in by magazine or site reviews who constantly review this overkill stuff.

[Dorian Gray]

Don't forget your power supply. One of the biggest power users on a PC is a high performance graphics card. Add a second one and you may overload it. A good quality power supply that can actually supply it's specified power rating for a sustained length of time (as opposed to a 450W power supply that will supply 450W for a few seconds), is fairly expensive. That's not totally true. At any wattage, there are power supplies that are lying (Dynex), power supplies that are actually more powerful than they claim (like the Fortron/FPS series), and everything in between, at all price points and quality levels.

I suggest Newegg as a great first stop.

[Dorian Gray]

OK I'm going to kill the wattage myth right here and now.

A 650W PSU with good amperage on the 12V rail(s) will power just about anything including 3 graphics cards. A 1K PSU is so laughably stupid because you need to be running huge amounts of equipment to need one.

Wattage is not the be all and end all for PSUs. The number of Amps on the 12V rail(s) is the crucial number to look at. Cheap PSUs with high wattage "rating" are worse than low wattage well made PSUs.

Bottom line is the most important component in any PC is the PSU. You don't need big watts, you need a brain, a quality make with good amperage on the rails to power what you require. Don't get sucked in by magazine or site reviews who constantly review this overkill stuff.

Define 'good amperage' - I've heard all kinds of figures, and I know if you have multiple rails you have to add them together, but is 25A the hurdle, or 30A or higher? I know you'll say 'depends on what you need' but I'm talking about for most people running a motherboard, 3 memory sticks, a hard drive, a dvd drive and an average middling graphics card, what's the wattage and amperage required?

[Gate2501]

OK I'm going to kill the wattage myth right here and now.

A 650W PSU with good amperage on the 12V rail(s) will power just about anything including 3 graphics cards. A 1K PSU is so laughably stupid because you need to be running huge amounts of equipment to need one.

Wattage is not the be all and end all for PSUs. The number of Amps on the 12V rail(s) is the crucial number to look at. Cheap PSUs with high wattage "rating" are worse than low wattage well made PSUs.

Bottom line is the most important component in any PC is the PSU. You don't need big watts, you need a brain, a quality make with good amperage on the rails to power what you require. Don't get sucked in by magazine or site reviews who constantly review this overkill stuff.

Oww...

My butt.

Anyhow, the 1kwatt must have more amps on my 12v rails then, because it solved my problems. I had thought that the issue was wattage from what I had read on tech websites and magazines.

I am an avid gamer/programmer, and I know my way around a PC. I think that I have a brain, I just never looked beyond the common conceptions surrounding PSU's, because every time I have had shutdowns due to power loss, a higher wattage supply always fixed things for me.

/shrug

[gumboot]

I'm running a pretty hungry machine with a pretty modest PSU and have never had supply issues.

[NewtonTrino]

I'm not a huge fan of SLI. You don't get a doubling in performance and not everything works with it. It's usually better to just get a newer card. Pixymisa's ideas up above pretty much sum up the best strategy for cost/performance.

Larrabee is going to be cool when it comes out.