Ultra low Aquamark, 7500 64MB and 5200 128MB

[yo4444]

I just bought an fx5200+ 128Mb (maddog)to upgrade from a 7500 radeon 64MB card on the forums here, cause it was cheap and should have been a decent improvement.

I ran Aquamark3 before I uninstalled the ATI, and got 11072 marks. After installing the 5200 with newest Nvidia drivers, I ran Aquamark3 and only got 8772. This card was supposed to come overclocked as well. Even at stock, it should have wiped A$$ with the old 7500. The 7500 IS overclocked, but just to 220 gpu, and stock 5200 is 250?

Can anyone tell me what's up? Suggestions? I don't know any utilities to check the clock on Nvidias, so if someone could suggest one, I'd appreciate it.

I have to get this machine back to my buddy today, so plz respond quickly.

Sorry for the double post, I got no help in 24 hours in other one.

Ran it with fastwrites and sideband addressing enabled, Oc'd it a bit, and still the highest I could hit was about 9100 marks.
This 5200 has double the memory, a higher mem clock, a higher GPU clock and 8x interface vs. the 4x of the 7500, and I still have the 5200 at a much lower score. Does this sound right? Is the card bad? Or did I just make a bad purchase cause I was uninformed.

 

[threeme2189]

maybe the filters are enabled and are slowing the card down...check the nvidia options thingy and turn down AA and AF filter thingies.(am i right?)

 

[yo4444]

the filters are not enabled, they are set to application preference, and If they would be detrimental in a bench, I'm sure the bench would have them off as a preference. I tried forcing mipmaps, but that lowered the score.
Still nothing is doing any good.

 

[Kram4sites]

I suggest putting back in the better ati card after pulling out the nvidia junkie and smashing it with a hammer, FANBOY'S RULE! J/k

Im not really sure what the problem is but I suggest you go through check all filters and settings, tweak them up a bit maybe overclock some more if possible and run aquamark a few more times, tell me if you find out anything new.

 

[yo4444]

Thats been done. Anything over 295 or so gpu artifacts or freezes. The highest I could come up with is 9100 or so Aquamarks. I'm totally baffled.

 

[brakezone]

I'm not sure what a 5200 will score in aquamark; however, even my 64-bit fx5200 would beat my geforce 4 mx 440 by a hair in 3dmark2001.

Do you know the memory interface of the two cards? if the 7500 is 128-bit ddr and the geforce 5200 is 64-bit ddr, that could explain the performance gaps. One thing I can tell you is that synthetic benchmarks isn't always everything. My geforce 4 mx 440 was 128-bit memory bus width while the fx5200 was 64-bit. So while the fx5200 had about 60% the memory bandwidth, its processing power was much greater. Battlefield 1942 played smoother with the fx5200 64-bit than the mx440. The fx5200 could also play doom 3 at a respectable FPS with rock bottom settings... probably averaging about 30 fps with the lowest settings acrosst he board, playable at least.

I was kinda angry about the fact that several years back I bought this mx440 for the same price as the recent fx5200 and it was only a hair better (200 points in 3dmark2001 or so). So I went out and bought a fx5900xt not too long after... This thing really helped alot and I was actually satisfied that there was a major increase in performance. The bottom line is that these companies do this on purpose, they make new budget cards that arn't really better than last years and then they sell them as though they are better, new directx features and such. These cards aim to be just a hair better than the previous budget cards. The FPS per dollar that you get with a budget card is horrible compared to a performance card. The fx5900 I bought cost twice as much as the fx5200; however, it gave 4 times the performance. Thats 2 times the graphics power per dollar. Take my advice and skip the next two 100 dollar upgrades and then spend that money on a 200$+ video card.

Now i'm using a vanilla geforce 6800 and the performance is about twice that of a 5900xt, it cost 3 times as much as a fx5200 and puts out 8 times the power... you see where this is going. The companies sell the budget cards on purpose in a way that the buyers will be disatisfied so that they will go out and buy the next best thing.... the customers will keep buying junk until they are satisfied- and they hope you won't return the stuff when your disatisfied so they throw in new direct x features so you'll play them with your games and they make it easy to overclock so you'll void thier warrentee

I'm never going to buy a budget card again...

But for your case I would say your best bet is to try out various benchmarks... my guess is that the fx5200 loses in some areas and shines in others compared to the 7500. Most likely its faster at lower resolutions and with lower texture details and in the newer directx 9 stuff. They did that on purpose actually, they thought since people were going to want to play doom 3 on a budget pc, that it would be more economical to increase the cards power in terms of pixel shading and decreasing its ability to render large frames and use lots of memory, after all what is the point of making it fast at rendering large frames if directx9 features would not be able to keep up? Sometimes I think people take a look at the world and they do what seems most economical at the present moment, but you have to ask yourself if that is really the most economical thing, buying a video card that will only perform a hair better than what came before it, or buying a performance model that will most likely perform to your satisfaction for awhile. Even geforce 4 ti edition owners probably still value the cards they bought so long ago, which outperform many of the newest low end budget cards.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that the high performance cards will drop significantly in price either, unless you want to buy used- they will stop making them and take them off the market and sell old budget, new budget, and new performance cards, essentially.

 

[yo4444]

I understand that, I just was hoping to get a bit of an upgrade with the meager funds avilable to me at the moment. I don't see myself spending $150.00+ any time soon for my PC (just bought an engagement ring) so I was hoping that something with double the mem and about 2-3 years newer would suffice. Apparrently not.

But I DO however now have a play card. I'm ghetto modding it now to either get something decent out of it or blow it up. LOL. Took an old HS off a P133, drilled a hole for 1 mount and am supergluing the other side on, and putting on an old 60mm amd k6 fan. Got some cheap ramsinks, and we'll see how it does. hehe