Best AGP video card?

Audigy

Audigy

New member
Yep, you read that right.

I refuse to retire my monster of a dual xeon p4 system (sup icenine0, dual xeon buddy ;D), as it does everything I need to do except maintain a constant 60FPS in World of Warcraft with nice-looking settings.

Tell me about AGP video cards. What's the latest and greatest? I don't have any requirements other than it being AGP. Price is not an issue, power consumption is not an issue, and space hogging is not an issue. (I have 2 empty 64-bit PCI slots hanging out next to the AGP slot, so it doesn't matter.)

Current card's a Radeon 9600 (128MB), by the way.

Other system specs are:

Supermicro P4DCE+ motherboard
2x 2.4GHz P4 Xeon processors (hyperthreaded, 512KB cache)
400MHz front-side bus
2GB ECC RDRAM
4x AGP slot

oh yeah, and a 21" LCD monitor that runs 1680x1050 natively. The display upgrade is what hosed me. I was able to get tolerable framerates at 1440x720 or whatever the heck it was that my other widescreen LCD did.

Thanks. :)
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Dual Xeons are awesome. Last time I benched mine, it was very competitive with modern chips in multithreading.

If you want a neat little utility, try http://www.mlin.net/SMPSeesaw.shtmlSMP Seesaw Pro</A>. You can shove all the OS processes onto your second chip and leave your primary entirely free for gaming. I don't know if it works better than Windows' thread management in all applications, but it seemed to give me a good boost most of the time.
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Kick ass. I'll give it a try when I get home. I'm sure it'll help a ton with the EAC/FLAC stuff I've been doing lately. <img src=smilies/thumb.gif>
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> Dual Xeons are awesome. Last time I benched mine, it was
> very competitive with modern chips in multithreading.

Where can I go to "benchmark" my dual P4 XEON machine sir?

> If you want a neat little utility, try SMP Seesaw Pro. You
> can shove all the OS processes onto your second chip and
> leave your primary entirely free for gaming. I don't know if
> it works better than Windows' thread management in all
> applications, but it seemed to give me a good boost most of
> the time.

Cool utility. But somewhere in one of these recent windows (2003 Server?) you can specify which program/service uses which processor...or at least I could of sworn I saw that somewhere. I do know that you can manually do it by doing this (works on some things--not all):

task_1.png


task_2.png

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> Where can I go to "benchmark" my dual P4 XEON machine sir?

I used http://www.cpuid.com/pcwizard.phpthis guy</A> right here, PC Wizard. It's a nice suite and has some cool overlays. It has a specific test for multithreading that Xeons really cruise on.

> Cool utility. But somewhere in one of these recent windows
> (2003 Server?) you can specify which program/service uses
> which processor...or at least I could of sworn I saw that
> somewhere.

Yes, that's true. You can do that in both XP Pro and Server 2003. However, the program's purpose is to streamline things.

In SMP Seesaw you can, for example, pick a process and "Isolate" it on one core / CPU. It'll then set all the appropriate affinities in one shot.
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I have something extremely similar to that top card, and I like it. I'm no gamer, but when I tried it with what little I had on the PC (GTA Vice City) everything was really smooth with beefed up settings.
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to be the second person in this thread to actually suggest something, i would go with either the radeon x1650 pro or the nvidia 6800gt
<P ID="signature">Chris

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> to be the second person in this thread to actually suggest
> something, i would go with either the radeon x1650 pro or
> the nvidia 6800gt
>

Funny, I picked up a radeon x1650 pro this evening. ;)
Just about to wander into WoW to see if I can turn all the shit up without chunking, hoho.

I learned a lot about video cards this week.

I also learned a lot about diamond inflating the hell out of their minimum system requirements on the box. (38a on 12v rail, what in flying fuck?? I have 18a and it works ok so far)
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I run an ATI Radeon x1600 Pro @512mb. With a little overclocking, I can run Oblivon near max, let alone WoW. tigerdirect.com usually has good deals on hardware.
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I run a crap RAGE PRO on my other comp and I can run a fully accurate route (Dense Trees, huge 1000m/\ mountains) full crank on MS Train Sim. Call THAT amazing.
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> I run an ATI Radeon x1600 Pro @512mb. With a little
> overclocking, I can run Oblivon near max, let alone WoW.
> tigerdirect.com usually has good deals on hardware.

In my experience they gouge you on prices. NewEgg.com and ZipZoomFly are much better.
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> I run a crap RAGE PRO on my other comp and I can run a fully
> accurate route (Dense Trees, huge 1000m/\ mountains) full
> crank on MS Train Sim. Call THAT amazing.


2001 called. They want their game back.
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