well building a new system. all my parts ordered except video card. my system: amd mobile 2600 (will overclock)with sp 97 heatsing and 92 mm fan abit nf7s 1GB (2x512)ocz pc3500 platinum samsung 80gb sata 8mb cache hd antec super lan boy pc case antec true blue 480 watt psu ok heres my question i have a ati radeon 9800 pro 128 mb in another system. will i get full power from the x800 with that system or should i just use my radeon 9800 pro?
I have seen people double their 3dmark scores (and far cry fps) moving from 9800 to x800 so I would say x800. Dont read into that cpu limiting thing.
If you have the cash then go for it 9800 is superb value for money but the X800 leaves it far behind. My 3DMark03 went from 6700 to 12900 just changing from a 9800 Pro to an X800 XT PE Incidently why only an 80gb hard drive? the price difference between say, 80 and 120, or even 160, is hardly anything these days and with new games taking upwards of 5gb a time 80gb seems a little optimistic?
I mention about CPU limitations because they're there... you're not seeing the full potential of an X800XT on a 3800+; however, the performance that you will get from a bottlenecked X800 will be far superior to what you get from a 9800PRO. I would say that unless you're actually looking at upgrading the rest of your system before the end of this year, you might be better waiting for a PCI-Express graphics board - if you aren't looking at upgrading before PCI-Express becomes the main solution for graphics cards, you'll be spending £300 now on an AGP board, and then you'll have to fork out another £300+ when you upgrade to a PCI-Express based motherboard. It's your £300 and not mine though, as they say.
I agree, the AthlonXP though fast (esp @ 2.4ghz+) is really going to hold back the perf of all the new top-end cards, by the time the 9800Pro struggles on a remotely regular basis you should find X800_Pro perf costs half of what it does now. If you've got the cash the X800_Pro/XT is a great card and you can overcome some of the CPU limitation by setting max details, upping the res and forcing on full AA+AF. It would be a shame to not have it runnig on Athlon64, but if you're going to have one more top-end than the other the gfx card is th ebetter choice (for gamers). If I was in your shoes I'd wait using my 9800Pro to tide me over, things should get very interesting and competitive come December.
My PC once beat a PC with a faster CPU and more RAM in AutoCAD. Specs for my PC: 2.4GHz P4 640MB RAM 64MB Radeon 9000 AIW Specs for other PC: 2.66GHz P4 1GB RAM 32MB GeForce 2 MX 400 I have checked, and in a real-time animation, only about 5% of the CPU is used on my machine, and about 25% on the other machine (newer video cards do indeed reduce CPU load). Also, in Fear Factor (a video card benchmark), the CPU usage is so low it can't be measured. Once, a friend of mine decided to put a Radeon 9700 into a 350MHz P2 (for a little fun), and it ran Fear Factor just as fast as a 2.4GHz P4 with the Radeon 9700!
