3 AGP cards. Which one ???

I am looking for a AGP video card for a friend. It is going in a Dell Deminson 8250 2.8ghz P4, 1.25gig's of Rambus memory.

Power supply is a Dell 250watt HP-P2507F3C.

Located a EVGA 6800GT with a A/C Silencer 5

nVidia GeForce 6800GS also with a A/C Silencer

ATI 850XT

Given your rathers which one would you pick. And if you do not mind why ???

And last but not least do I need a more powerful power supply ???

x850 would be the fastest and i would get a 400w psu to power it.

I have a 350watt Fortron Aroura.

What games is your friend going to play?

The X850XT is going to be the fastest, however it has a limitation where it will only do Shader Model 2.0. The 6800's will do Shader Model 3.0. Some newer games won't run on a card that can't do at least Shader Model 3.0. GRID is the only one I recall off-hand but I know there are others.

6800GS is easily the worst of the three.

GotNoRice said:

What games is your friend going to play?

The X850XT is going to be the fastest, however it has a limitation where it will only do Shader Model 2.0. The 6800's will do Shader Model 3.0. Some newer games won't run on a card that can't do at least Shader Model 3.0. GRID is the only one I recall off-hand but I know there are others.

6800GS is easily the worst of the three.

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Summed up very nicely, As for the PSU question, I would suggest an upgrade, Probably to something in the 400 watt range.

The X850XT should actually be fine on the 250W supply. The card only draws something like 65-70W under full load, and the Dell PSU has an honest 15A on the 12V. Doesn't leave a whole lot of headroom, but it's doable.

There are actually quite a few games now that need SM3.0. It's not something that's often outright advertised, either, since SM3.0 cards have been around so long anyway, it's kinda assumed you'll have one. Then again, a lot of those newer games aren't going to run too well on such an old system anyway, so I dunno if you're really losing much, and on the things that it will run, an X850XT is significantly faster than a 6800GT.

The card is for my neighbor. Her son is playing Runes of Magic. It will not play with the onboard video and he has taken over her new laptop that barely plays it.

These are the "offical" minimum requirments.

128MB of RAM (graphics memory, not *system memory*)
Pixel Shader 2.0
DirectX 9.0c

I told her not to spend any money on such an old system as her kid would probably move on to some other game that requires modern hardware to run the newer games.

For now she just wants him off of her new lappy. I can get the 6800GT for 40.00 dollars shipped. Guy has not gotten back with me on the other 2 cards.

She might buy my DFI nF4 Lanparty UT, AMD 4800+, XFX 4870 loaner rig. But I told her even that box will probably be quickly outdated. Trying to get her to build him a "new" computer. But that will not be till after the first of the year.

Thanks for the help guys. Not too up on the older stuff and just want to buy the better of those 3 cards. Maybe I should just jump on the 6800GT and hope he does not move on to a more hardware intensive game.

You might want to check that his Dell uses a standard atx power supply some of the rdram systems don't

Thanks for the tip Trap05. Now I am in trouble. Showed her NewEgg and now she wants to get this video card.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125281

Ugghhh. This is not getting any easier.

The 4670's are better although more money. Honestly though I don't think it makes any sense to put this kind of money into a system that old

Hookem said:

Thanks for the tip Trap05. Now I am in trouble. Showed her NewEgg and now she wants to get this video card.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125281

Ugghhh. This is not getting any easier.

Click to expand...

Does the motherboard even support AGP 8X? then again it says it requires a 400 watt psu so if upgrading that she may as well go higher and transfer it over to a newer system build in the future. I have to agree and say find something cheap to get by until a system upgrade can be done.

Realistically, a 4650 isn't going to be that much of an upgrade from the X850XT. I mean, yeah, it's faster, but Runes of Magic has such light requirements that it's not going to make any noticeable difference, and other more demanding games are just going to end up being CPU limited.

I'd go with the X850XT if you can... if the guy doesn't get back to you, go with the 6800GT. Either one of those is going to do fine for the purpose, and spending more than about $40 just doesn't make sense for that system.

And, once again, I really don't think it's necessary to upgrade the power supply, as none of those cards are particularly power hungry. The 4650 is actually the lightest of the bunch... it certainly doesn't need a 400w PSU, regardless of what the recommended specs say. That machine does have a standard ATX PSU if you're really intent on upgrading it, though.

Dell list the Dimension 8250 as 4xAGP. Well that should be ammunition enough to talk her out of getting the MSI 4650.

On this loaner box that is a Socket 939 4800+ AMD rig with 4gigs of ram and the XFX 4870. What is the bottleneck and should I sell it to her or convice her that much better can be had for not much more money ???

I am not a gamer. Well not since Soldier of Fortune took over my life for about 6 months many years ago. A friend has Fallen Earth loaded on it and claims it runs the game with everything set on maximum but from the looks of the game it really does not look like a real high end game.

Really do not want to sell it but she is offering me 400 without the Lian-Li P7B Plus case.

I just think she will be getting the short end of the stick so to speak. It probably will not run any of the high end games unless it is at lower settings. But I really have no idea what its limitations are.

If you can get $400 for that and both be happy go for it! It would be much better than the Dell

That S939 system is not nearly as obsolete as you seem to think it is. It's actually still pretty decent... it'll run pretty much any game currently on the market with OK results, and it should be able to hold its own for another couple years as long as the kid is not concerned about super high resolution gaming with maxed out settings.

Yeah, better could be had, but it'd be pretty difficult to do for $400.

Yeah I really want to just keep it. Especially if it will not become obsolete for a couple of years.

Spent 1200 bones for the processor a couple of days after it hit the market. It has served me well and keep's my friends off of my main rig.

Look's like the smart thing to do is take my loaner box off the chopping block, get the 8600gt, load Runes of Magic and keep my mouth shut.

If the kid moves on to a new game just cross that bridge when the time comes.

Thanks for the help guys.

ATi has way more bang for the buck on AGP then nVidia. However consider how much of a bottleneck that P4/mobo is going to present for the card. No sense getting the high-end 4xxx cards if the CPU can't feed it fast enough. Do some research on what the card limits would be for that CPU. I have dual Netburst (P4 core) Xeon Prestonias @3.3GHz and the limit I found was an HD3650, but I got that card for HTPC purposes and for light gaming. It will run DX10 on Vista/Win7 though
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102814

YMMV