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Hey

Is this card any good for 3d gaming; ATI FireGL2 . There aren't much reviews about it. Does it deliver performance comparable to a gforce2.

What graphics card would you recommend for an 850mhz duron processor with 256 mb of ram. I currently have a voodoo 3 3000 installed. And newer games such as mafia dont work well with it.

Would it be better to upgrade my other computer with the i810 chipset and an 800Mhz celeron.


Thx in advance.

Hello.

Overview
The ATI Fire GL2 is a high performance 3-D and 2-D accelerator targeted at midrange workstation systems incorporating Intel® Pentium® III and IV Processors. Fire GL2 is based on the RC1000/GT1000 chipset from the IBM Visual Products Division utilizing a 64-MB frame buffer with 25-bit wide double data rate (DDR) SGRAM memory. RC1000 integrates all of the functionality of a VGA controller, 2-D/3-D raster engine with pipeline setup processor plus 300 MHZ RAMDAC in a single package, together with support for video streams, by providing a color space conversion and bilinear scaling unit. GT1000 incorporates a complete transform-and-lighting engine with texture coordinate and fog calculations performing at a 35-Gflops rate.
The RC1000/GT1000 chipset implements the full OpenGL pipeline and most of the Direct3D geometry pipeline in hardware. The board supports the industry standard AGP4X port with sideband addressing and provides bandwidth in excess of one GByte/s for host related transfers. Fire GL2 provides robust 3-D performance for professional MCAD, DCC, and GIS users and others who require advanced computing power. The unique combination of high performance and a complete set of advanced features makes Fire GL2 an ideal choice for market segments such as:

Mechanical Engineering Analysis (MEA)
Mechanical Computer Aided Design (MCAD)
Electrical Design Automation (EDA)
Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE)
Digital Content Creation (DCC)
Business Economic Modeling

Specifications
Dimensions (LxHxW) Approximately 6.5 x 3.8 x 0.6 inches (16.51 x 9.65 x 1.52 cm)
Resolution Maximum Colors Supported Maximum Refresh Rate Memory Dedicated to Texture Support
640 x 480 16.7 M 100 Hz 28.4 MB
800 x 600 16.7 M 100 Hz 26.4 MB
1024 x 768 16.7 M 100 Hz 22.8 MB
1152 x 864 16.7 M 100 Hz 20.3 MB
1280 x 1024 16.7 M 100 Hz 16.6 MB
1600 x 1000 16.7 M 85 Hz 13.3 MB
1600 x 1200 16.7 M 85 Hz 9.5 MB
1920 x 1200 16.7 M 76 Hz 5 MB
Note: Texture memory is dynamically allocated, not dedicated. Video memory can also be used for Z-buffering, etc. and system memory can be allocated for texturing.
Form factor ATX
3D/2D controller IBM® RC1000rasterizer chip
VGA controller IBM RC1000r asterizer chip
Bus type AGP 1X/2X/4X version 2.0 compliant including side band signaling support
RAMDAC 300 MHz IBM RC1000
Memory type DDR SGRAM
Memory amount 64 MB DDR SGRAM unified frame buffer, Z-buffer and texture storage
Memory speed 120 MHz
Controller clock speed 120 MHz
Color planes 32 bit, True Color
Overlay planes 8-bit
Stencil planes 8-bit
Alpha planes 8-bit
Z-buffer 24-bit
Video engine support YUV (4:2:2, 4:2:0) conversion, point and bilinear scaling
Mini-Din stereo interface support StereoGraphics® CrystalEyes® shutter glasses
Monitor 15-pin D-type analog
Flat panel interface DVI-D digital (supported resolutions up to 1600 x 1200)
Video timings compliance VESA DMT 1.0 and VESA GTF 1.0 specifications
Maximum vertical refresh rate 100 Hz / 120 Hz when quad buffer stereo is enabled
Maximum pixel clock 300-MHz
Operating systems Microsoft Windows 2000 and Microsoft Windows NT 4.0


I dunno... It is a workstation Graphics card

Its a fairly decent card for that system, also check the Radeon 7200,s they are really cheap and I have one in a older box with a 800 P3 and it runs everything just fine including UT2003.

yeah stick with a Radeon series.

I'm running 800mhz P3 and I use a Radeon 8500. My 'puter can't take full use of it, but it's nice.

I'd recommend a Radeon 8500/Gf3 or some less powerful.

7500 might be a good choice, unless you plan on upgrading your computer in the fairly near future.

The most i can get out of my motherboard is athlon1.4. It has a 233 mhz front side bus. By my knowledge athlonXP is 266Mhz.

What motherboard do you have? There may be inexpensive processor upgrades available for it.

Get a good video card, not some obsolete POS. If your CPU cannot push enough data to it to make your games run at 300 frames/second, then turn up the resolution and color depth "for free", enable anti-aliasing "for free", and turn up anisotropic filtering "for free". If your CPU is the bottleneck, you may not see any higher frame rate with a better video card, but you can make each frame look better.

I agree with the engineer.

I have a P3 550 with 512MB PC100 that has been begging for an upgrade, but I've been waiting for the money to be right. A year ago I bought GF4 Ti 4400 for $200 (open box, full warranty) and even though my frame rates are not improved and I have a "CPU bottleneck" the graphics look great and all of the rich color, transparency, and realism of modern games comes through. Occcasionally I notice some jerkiness to the frame rates, but the general feeling is immersion and that's the goal in gaming.

-E!

By the way... Im in Los Angeles now, but I was born in Lower Alabama (Mobile). Small world!

if you have plan to run on your old system less than another one year
So upgrade to a radeon 8500 is waste of money
i d go for 7500 and later if you had enough money just upgrade the hole system...

Hi. For your Duron 850mhz, I'd go for an ATI Radeon 9000 64mb for £72, or a GF4 Ti4200 128mb for around £130. Both cards are fully utilized DX8 VGA cards and thus provide features like vertex/pixel shaders. The GF4 Ti4200 is quite a bit faster than the R9000, but also at a steeper price.

You should consider upgrading your video card to the fastest cpu that you can put on your motherboard. AMD CPU's are cheap these days, especially the ones that match your board, and only going down in price. You could supplement your video card upgrade with cpu upgrade now or soon and wind up w/ a pretty decent system. What brand and model of motherboard do you have?

hi, i currently have a duron 750 but can upgrade to 1.3 at the most and probably will do it within the next month or so. I'm deciding between 8500le and 9000pro, what's the difference between the 2 and which one is better?

http://www.tech-report.com/reviews/2002 ... dex.x?pg=3

Under most circumstances, the 8500LE is significantly more capable than the 9000 Pro.

YBK - Where did this '233 bus' invasion come from? You're the second guy in a month I've heard say that! There are currently only three official front side bus speeds from AMD: 200, 266, and 333. Unless you have one of the ancient KT133 non-A motherboards and are running 116.5 FSB, or 233 DDR, then you can do 266 FSB processors just fine.

Jimbo i'd suggest you check the ti4200 out, really decent card better than 8500LE, also the price is acceptable

Iamlearning wrote:

Jimbo i'd suggest you check the ti4200 out, really decent card better than 8500LE, also the price is acceptable

i thought about getting ti4200, but it's at least $60 more than 8500le here in vancouver, then plus damn tax, can't afford it..

I have a gigabyte GA-7IXEH.

With the latest BIOS, your motherboard would support the Duron 1.3 GHz (Morgan) on a 100MHz (200MHz DDR) front side bus. The Gigabyte website does not say so, but I would expect that you could therefore run an under-clocked AthlonXP (Palomino) on a 100MHz FSB. Getting Duron 1.3 GHz ($41) speed from an AthlonXP 2100+ ($118) might disappoint you.

If you started with an AthlonXP 1600+ ($53) and increased the multiplier, you could get the core CPU speed back after the FSB was underclocked from 133 to 100. Unfortunately, the Gigabyte manual says nothing about being able to change the multiplier in the BIOS or by using jumpers. Instead of just unlocking the CPU, you would probably have to set the L5 bridges to get the multiplier that you wanted. In my experience, this is a pain and probably much more trouble than you want to go to. An inexpensive motherboard upgrade would be a lot easier.

Is a duron 1.3 much slower than athlon 1.4. The athlon 1.4 is hard to find. All i can see in most stores are athlon XPs and durons.

Sorry i guess my motherboard is 200mhz front side bus; where did read 233 i wonder.

no, at least not by much as it's got data prefetch and something else...3dnow pro (intell sse) or something and in some case's i believe it's a bit faster