ATI Radeon or nVidia?
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They do not have the exact one that I have but this one is close: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121360&Tpk=8400gs%20asus[^] But now I would look at a 9400 9500 or 210 fanless.
John
If you can find one in fanless the 220 would give you a decent amount of future headroom even if you don't game; with 48 shaders vs 16 (32 in the 9500) you'll have alot more hardware for cuda to work with when new video codecs come out. It's not that much hotter than an 8500 and I know they came in single slot fanless models (and the heatsink itself was a rather wimpy looking model).
3x12=36 2x12=24 1x12=12 0x12=18
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What's your preference? I've used both in the past, and see little difference, but I know a lot of people have strong opinions about the brands available, and usually for good reason. While I have a good recommendation for the server card from John already, I want something a little more zippy for the client system. High powered grapics acceleration isn't necessary, as I couldn't care less about gaming, but I do enjoy photography and an occasional movie, and I might be venturing into video editing sometime this year. At the moment I'm running WinXP, but I wouldn't be averse to switching to Windows 7 eventually. What do you suggest? Is there a viable 3rd option?
"A Journey of a Thousand Rest Stops Begins with a Single Movement"
It is really six of one and half a dozen of the other. I tend to use NVIDIA cards while a friend uses ATI cards. We both do some heavy duty gaming in our free time and have been using our preferred manufacturers for many years. The cards leap frog for performance dominance every generation or two but the one thing you will definitely find is that a new architecture will inevitably have driver quirks that are worked out through patches over the first year or so. Both companies have Linux drivers available. For genaral use, you can't really go wrong with either NVIDIA or ATI although ATI does have a performance edge currently but you don't really need a top end card.
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What's your preference? I've used both in the past, and see little difference, but I know a lot of people have strong opinions about the brands available, and usually for good reason. While I have a good recommendation for the server card from John already, I want something a little more zippy for the client system. High powered grapics acceleration isn't necessary, as I couldn't care less about gaming, but I do enjoy photography and an occasional movie, and I might be venturing into video editing sometime this year. At the moment I'm running WinXP, but I wouldn't be averse to switching to Windows 7 eventually. What do you suggest? Is there a viable 3rd option?
"A Journey of a Thousand Rest Stops Begins with a Single Movement"
All you can really do is go off of current benchmarks and your budget. They both have products that are nearly identical in performance. Each has had problems of the years and each company produces top notch cards today. You can't really compare past cards and asking one's opinion will surely show someone's bias towards a name brand.
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What's your preference? I've used both in the past, and see little difference, but I know a lot of people have strong opinions about the brands available, and usually for good reason. While I have a good recommendation for the server card from John already, I want something a little more zippy for the client system. High powered grapics acceleration isn't necessary, as I couldn't care less about gaming, but I do enjoy photography and an occasional movie, and I might be venturing into video editing sometime this year. At the moment I'm running WinXP, but I wouldn't be averse to switching to Windows 7 eventually. What do you suggest? Is there a viable 3rd option?
"A Journey of a Thousand Rest Stops Begins with a Single Movement"
ATI by far. Both have flaky drivers, but I get BSODs with NVidia on a system that never had problems with ATI. Moreover, NVidia has no DirectX 11 cards yet. Right now, the card of choice is probably the ATI 5770 (not only is it fast, but the lower power requirements are very impressive.) That said, some systems just plain don't work well with one or the other. I have a system that has problems with NVidia, but none with ATI. My brother has a system with the opposite problem. So, make sure whatever you buy, you can return. Also pay special attention to what extra power cabling you may need.
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I use ATI, cant stand nVidia. Maybe i'm the only guy around that has never had a problem with ATI drivers, ever. nVidia on the other hand constantly causes me issues. My roommate in college was having issues with games not playing and getting strange graphical errors in the ones that would load, so i gave him my radeon 9700(yeah it was a while ago) as soon as he got the drivers installed his whole pc ran faster and all the errors with running games want away. I think 90% of the other games started working too. I had a 8600, i think, in my work PC and it would barely run halo with out me having to go into the control center and changing things, it also did weird things to my color settings right out of the box i never could get them set right. I could be biased since i was a huge 3dfx fan and nVidia bought them and discontinued everything they made. The Voodoo 5 5500 was still the coolest and biggest video card i've ever owned.
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No, you're not the only one. I've never had an issue with ATI (AMD?) drivers, but I've seen way too many issues with nVidia, so I stick with ATI even if nVidia is the current market leader of the year (as others have said, they leap frog so it really depends on when you buy and how much you want to spend). That said, I also find ATI's models easier to track for the most part, though they're both guilty of renaming their model lines so frequently that it's hard to remember what's newer than what sometimes. And if you're looking to upgrade from one brand to the other, good luck finding a definitive performance comparison chart to really tell you where you are in the "other guy's" product line so you know where to go next. But I digress.
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No, you're not the only one. I've never had an issue with ATI (AMD?) drivers, but I've seen way too many issues with nVidia, so I stick with ATI even if nVidia is the current market leader of the year (as others have said, they leap frog so it really depends on when you buy and how much you want to spend). That said, I also find ATI's models easier to track for the most part, though they're both guilty of renaming their model lines so frequently that it's hard to remember what's newer than what sometimes. And if you're looking to upgrade from one brand to the other, good luck finding a definitive performance comparison chart to really tell you where you are in the "other guy's" product line so you know where to go next. But I digress.
I've found Anand Tech[] to have good comparisons between cards. When i bought it my HD3870 was keeping up with the top end nVidia of the time. Yes it had like 10 or 20% lower performance numbers but it cost half as much, and seeing how nothing else from either brand was close i call that keeping up. The only problem i've had with ATI recently, is that when i installed a second hd3870 in my xFire set up it keeps showing the second card as disabled, regardless of what card i acutally put in the second slot. It shows all the info about it, just calls it disabled.
Please remember to rate helpful or unhelpful answers, it lets us and people reading the forums know if our answers are any good.
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I've found Anand Tech[] to have good comparisons between cards. When i bought it my HD3870 was keeping up with the top end nVidia of the time. Yes it had like 10 or 20% lower performance numbers but it cost half as much, and seeing how nothing else from either brand was close i call that keeping up. The only problem i've had with ATI recently, is that when i installed a second hd3870 in my xFire set up it keeps showing the second card as disabled, regardless of what card i acutally put in the second slot. It shows all the info about it, just calls it disabled.
Please remember to rate helpful or unhelpful answers, it lets us and people reading the forums know if our answers are any good.
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Are you sure that's not a motherboard issue and not ATI? I've never setup CrossFire or SLI so I'm shooting in the dark here.
nope, i have no idea which is at fault. All i know is that it did this on my old MSI board and my new Gigibyte board. I've looked at the bios and didnt see anything, and dont feel like pulling everything apart again and re trying and re installing everything right now. I can play L4D2 with max settings with no problem, so i'm not too worried about it worst case i have a spare if the one dies.
Please remember to rate helpful or unhelpful answers, it lets us and people reading the forums know if our answers are any good.
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No, you're not the only one. I've never had an issue with ATI (AMD?) drivers, but I've seen way too many issues with nVidia, so I stick with ATI even if nVidia is the current market leader of the year (as others have said, they leap frog so it really depends on when you buy and how much you want to spend). That said, I also find ATI's models easier to track for the most part, though they're both guilty of renaming their model lines so frequently that it's hard to remember what's newer than what sometimes. And if you're looking to upgrade from one brand to the other, good luck finding a definitive performance comparison chart to really tell you where you are in the "other guy's" product line so you know where to go next. But I digress.
The reviews posted to www.HardOcp.com[^] are IMO the best in the business, because they're (almost?) unique in realizing that average framerate or 3dmark score is an all but worthless[^] benchmark; and instead what matters is how high you can crank the settings in a given game (this is mostly dependent on minimum FPS) while it remains smooth enough to play (things like motion blur make a game look smooth at lower framerates). Unfortunately their older reviews tend to be hard to find, and they generally don't review cards much below $100ish (not enough readership).
3x12=36 2x12=24 1x12=12 0x12=18
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What's your preference? I've used both in the past, and see little difference, but I know a lot of people have strong opinions about the brands available, and usually for good reason. While I have a good recommendation for the server card from John already, I want something a little more zippy for the client system. High powered grapics acceleration isn't necessary, as I couldn't care less about gaming, but I do enjoy photography and an occasional movie, and I might be venturing into video editing sometime this year. At the moment I'm running WinXP, but I wouldn't be averse to switching to Windows 7 eventually. What do you suggest? Is there a viable 3rd option?
"A Journey of a Thousand Rest Stops Begins with a Single Movement"
I've had both. ATI used to have lots of issues with their drivers, but they have improved substantially in the last two or three card generations. Seems to me like nVidia is going the other way. I now have an ATI 4870, switched from an nVidia 8800 Ultra. The 8800 had its share of driver problems - the driver would crash on a fairly regular basis during gaming and lock up the game, but not the system. It just displays a message that says the driver stopped responding and was restarted. I switched to the 4870 because I got a good deal on it, and I haven't had any issues since. I've switched back and forth many times over the years, but overall my experience has been better with ATI cards. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend the latest ATI cards at all, but I've had problems with the newer nVidia ones. EDIT: unrelated side note: never trust nVidia RAID with critical data...EVER. I can reproduce a complete data massacre on my 680i motherboard running RAID5 by just unplugging a drive while it is running to simulate a drive failure...BAM...goodbye data. Its like they never even tested it. Unforunately, I found this out after a drive really did fail. I decided to try to reproduce it and found it is very easily reproduced :doh: