Lmao XD.. I can feel your pain.. my computer is about on its last leg before I gotta make that heartbreaking upgrade

I <3 my X800 XL.

good for you =3

I do not share your feelings for outdated technology, sir. Forgive my lack of enthusiasim<3

Sure, it's outdated! But it's LESS outdated than what I have now! And it lets me put off buying a new computer for awhile.

True. I dont see why prolonging it is a good thing, besides the economic implications.

Some of us have our own jobs and bills to pay. Economic implications haunt our dreams.

Maybe?!

The truly irritating part is that my parents try to mooch off me.

PCI?! You need to add an "-E (penis)" to that.

I know!! I didn't have a choice. I only have PCI slots, and this is supposedly one of the best PCI cards you can buy.

not even agp?

Nope. I got this little beasty for something like 200 bucks. Y'get what you pay for, heheh.

no I mean, if your computer has agp why buy pci?
or you dont even have agp? nor pciexpress?

Just PCI slots. No AGP, no PCI-E.

Mines been hauling its weight long enough, and about in June, im spending $2000 on a new computer. It's already near impossible for me to find a replacement processor (socket A >_< ) and AGP slots aren't going to keep up with tommorows gaming.
Im waiting because of windows vista, and, of course, directx10. :3 yay games! :D

WHOO! 2,000 bucks'll get you a damn nice system these days.

A couple weeks ago my old Ti 4200 melted down entirely in such a way that not did I have no video, the computer wouldn't even boot if the card was in place. Took me awhile to figure out what was wrong.

So I used my security deposit refund to buy me a new 7600 GS. It's getting harder to find cards for AGP slots too.

What's a pixel? Is it expensive? Do they shade it with a lil umbrella?

Pixels are forged from the fiery depths of Mt. DOOOOOOM!

Frodo no. D:

*is hugging his trusty Sapphire GTO¨2 moded to X850XT *

Good taste, dude! I'm about ready to sell mine, though, since I'll be getting a Conroe soon, and I won't be able to use AGP anymore. :(

there is no sapphire GTO2 X800 series for AGP o_O

at least noone that can unlock to X850XT.

GTO2? Mine is a Saphire X800 GTO.

All I know is that it's super quiet. My dad has an overclocked X800 XL and it's friggin' noisy when a game starts.

But ... PCI is slower than AGP.

Hmm ... I suppose your right. PCI is still undisputed in everything other than video.

REAL GUYS USE ISA

VESA for the win! And honestly, in some cases vesa is faster than pci.

Lucky you, though I'm hopefully getting a new computer end of this year.

I have to hang on with my Geforce 3. >.>

I must say I'm satisfied with my GeForce Titanium 4800 128MB. It's agp but still powerful.

Blah. just scrape together 800-900 bucks and buy the components seperately. If you play your cards right, you'll end up with a top-of-the-line machine. There is definitely a sweetspot in the markets where Bang meets Buck and that's where I always aim. My computers tend to last me ... 3 or so years anyways. I've had this here lappy for one year now, actually, and I am seriously looking at greener pastures, with bigger had drives, more ram, and faster graphics!

I figure I can build a pretty decent system for about 600 bucks. This computer was dirt-cheap, and it's only a year old ... hopefully I can get at least one more year of use out of it with this card and maybe a RAM upgrade before scrapping it for a new one.

... Or, hell, I could just keep slowly upgrading it until it's a completely new machine.

I found a AGPx8 cool to play TES4 Oblivion for like $60 but it crashed my computer every time I try 3D games and then I quit playing games for the rest of my life lol

eeee, I have a GeForce 6200 sitting in my closet. It's the AGP version, but still same card.

I use an ATI All-In-Wonder 9800; bought the GeForce when I was frantically trying to get my new motherboard to cooperate with Second Life. I took the GeForce out when I put my old motherboard back in (after tracing the problem to the new motherboard) because the GeForce 6200 had some weird graphical glitches in Oblivion.

It should still let Oblivion run, just be sure to turn off most of the advanced graphical effects.

I should mention that I think the weird graphical glitches might also have had more to do with the motherboard than the GeForce 6200

I don't trust that evil motherboard at all anymore... it's been sitting in its box for months now... MENACINGLY...

Careful. It could be plotting your demise! I once had a CPU fan that tried to kill me in my sleep. It growled menacingly everytime I was near.

I don't care too much about graphical quality, really. I can live with low detail settings. I just needed something that was, y'know, SUPPORTED.

Same here!

Well well well. (cracks knuckels) You purchased a consumer graphics card. And so did most of you, or pretty much all of you. If you want the real deal, you must go with the commercial grade video cards the graphic designers use. Nvidia Quadro boards. And guess what? There PCI cards.

I tease because I have painfully learned expensive lessons here. Most all of the consumer grade video cards are not qualified to run commercial 3D applications. You can go to your 3D (commercial) program site of your choice and look at the quallified cards they recommend. Might be one or two ATI cards now, but pretty much Nvidia and some others that you have not heard of. All depends on what you want to do. Actually for 200 bucks you can get a Quadro board. Very very durable. The rest of them, after lets say a week of renedering, they smoke. I believe you are correct for only spending $600 on a computer though. That's really all you need. I just want to sayone more thing for the record . "ATI BLOWS DEAD GOATS IN HELL!!!!"

Yeah, but which card do you buy for *games*? ;)

Hmm. Good question. I'm going to ask some industry pros about the mechanics of what a game needs. I do not want to be full of shit and tell you something I don't have information about. However I will tell you this. I work in the chip manufacturing industry. Here's what all the makers do. The chips are made on a silicon wafer 200-300mm in diameter. Thats 6"-8" for you Americans. The chips in the center of the wafer have the best uniformity with the various layers of materials. These are called Bin 1 chips. They will be sold as top dollar such as the best memory chip or cpu you can buy and perhaps even end up in Military applications. As the chips move away from the center they get shittier because the uniformity is worse. These don't pass the rigorous tests of the center chips so they lable them bin 2. These become the less costly Cpu or memory stick and sold mainly to the consumer. ie instead of 1GB now ist 512M memory or instead of 4GHz CPU its 3.6GHz.
I hope you get the idea here. Basically when you buy the consumer stuff, you get the chips further and further from the center of the wafer. Eventually you will find some video card on sale and buy it only to have it crap out on you in a couple of months. Yep, you got taken for a ride. Happend to me plenty of times.Of course there is always the issue of software. I won't go into that because I don't know about software. Seriously, I'll inquire to what the games need. I'm curious myself. Regards, AJ

Well, the problem with the workstation-class chips is that the drivers and microcode are designed for accuracy and supporting specific applications. This makes them perform quite poorly for gaming, and usually, they don't support certain features at all, which may cause games to fail. I don't know about the Quattro chips, but I do know that most chips with high-end OpenGL drivers will not run games at all -- too many game-specific routines are missing from the drivers (assuming the game uses OpenGL, of course).

OpenGL is divided into two major components, the framework and the renderer. The framework is standardized and largely CPU/OS agnostic. The renderer (the driver and low-level routines) is very hardware specific. Just because a graphics card uses OpenGL doesn't mean it will run all OpenGL software. Most game engines also demand certain driver features, and if they are missing, the games will just exit, rather than disable those features or use emulation. It's like having two applications that use SIMD instructions, but one uses SIMD directly, and will fail on CPUs that lack the instructions, while the other application uses SIMD through a library, and will simply run slower if those instructions are not available (I'll skip commenting about Apple's over-dependency on architecture-specific SIMD support, and PowerPC's compatibility woes).

Oh yeah, and every time I hear "Quattro", I still think of Audi. ;)

Well there ya go. I learned something. The comercial cards will most likely not work well for games. Figures.

That is not old look at mine I have a Matrox MX440 at 64mb and I do it all

Hey, wow! I had ... either an MX400 or an MX440 before this one, yeah. And it DID perform well for quite some time. I just wish I'd done some research before buying the MX4000 I'm using now. Damn MX series and their lack of DirectX 9 support ...

Schyeah, I can live without running games with anti-aliasing and HDR lighting at 60 FPS.

Ooooh, technology! Kids these days. Back in my day the video card took up half the room and when the power button was hit the neighborhood would start browning out!