HIS ATI Radeon X1950 Pro ICEQ3 Turbo 256MB GDDR3 HDTV/Dual DVI (AGP)
£144 inc delivery from overlclockers.co.uk.
I decided to go for the HIS 256 one instead of the Sapphire 512 (even though they were the same price) as the performance difference on a 256 to 512 would be next to none on my system, and I'd much rathjer have the arctic cooling system on the HIS card.
Plus the HIS card is already a higher clock speed, and the cooling should make it pretty easy for me to overclock.
Selling my 6800 for £40 to someone in work, so it's only costing me a £100, which I don't think is bad, as I doubt I will upgrade anything on my PC now for about 2 years.
MrGreen wrote:Well done good sir, I want in game benchmarks as well!
In case anyone was wondering how you do these
here's the Far Cry one that magazines and web reviewers use a lot. There are ones for CoD and Quake 4 too.
Soft bastard here has just realised he's bought a PCI Express graphics card but he (somehow) only has standard PCI slots in his MoBo. It's only a year old for fucks sake!
Dunno what the shit I'm meant to do now... Send it back I suppose and hope for the best. What're the odds of me getting a decent non-PCI Express card?
tandino wrote:Soft bastard here has just realised he's bought a PCI Express graphics card but he (somehow) only has standard PCI slots in his MoBo. It's only a year old for fucks sake!
Dunno what the shit I'm meant to do now... Send it back I suppose and hope for the best. What're the odds of me getting a decent non-PCI Express card?
You could get a 7800 AGP card, or buy a motherboard replacement that has PCI-E.
Dr. kitteny berk wrote:i'd send it back and pull the 14 days (iirc) distance buying cause.
Yeah I'm going to I think, according to the email I have (puts on scary 'The Ring' voice) 7 days from the day after I receive it to send it back for a full refund, providing it's unopened (which it will be). I've already bought <a href="http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showprodu ... =411">this one</a> and it'll be with me on Thursday. HOO RAH!
So If all goes according to plan, I've got 2 months to pay off the money on my credit card spent on the card above, which won't be a problem when I'm reinbursed the money for the first card as I'll do it straight away. Novatech are very good for customer service with refunds etc.
As you can see, the massive difference was with 3dMark03, as previously I had to cringe when watching the 2nd bit of the test, wheras now everything runs absolutely smooth, and at a very very high framerate.
3dMark05 was a massive jump though, as before the card just couldn't cope with benchmark at all, and every single test jerked along at about 3-5 frames per second. Now it's actually nice to be able to watch the benchmark playback at an acceptable framerate.
I know my CPU is letting me down, as the CPU tests in 05 never went above 1 frame per second, but I know I'm not changing that so it doesn't matter.
Onto the useful bits though, the game themselves.
COD:UO - I could always play COD:UO at the highest resolution and with most setting turned to high, but I was now able to turn absolutely every single thing up to it's maximum level, and the game looked fantastic considering its age.
FEAR MP - As it's one of the most recent games I own, I decided to install this and ramp up the settings to maximum on everything all at 1920x1200 and it also looked brilliant, without the card struggling at all.
After playing for about 15 minutes however, the card suddenly froze and the PC was hung, but I am sure this is due to my power supply, and it looks like I may need to upgrade to atleast a 600W as I am currently on a 450W.
Battlefield 2 - Ramped everything up to it's maximum level on 1920x1200, and after a few seconds of the map starting the card seemed to struggle a bit with a lack of framerate, but it seemed to sort itself out after about 30 seconds, and then everything looked fantastic. Once again after about 30 mins the card/machine locked up, so I'd put this down to the lack of power.
Sometime this week I plan on testing COD2, HL2/CS:S and the BF2142 Demo.
I am not sure if BF2142 is more intensive graphically than BF2, because if it isn't I wont bother downloading the demo.
Think I have Far Cry somewhere on my floor, so might give that a whirl, as my 6800 struggled with that even though it was released a long time after the game (I think, might be wrong there though)
Should be arriving sometime today. Hopefully Mrs Woo doesn't leave the house till it arrives 
