Best ATI card for the money??

[BaneNWN]

Whats the best ATI card i can get for under 400$??My 6600 GT took a crap and im back to using my geforce 3 ti-200 which actually still runs boiling point halfway decent.I told myself i would stick with Nvidia forever but ive had problems with them latley and was thinking of getting one of the X800 series ATI cards.Anyone have one of these and if so are they fairly reliable??Im kinda peed off about my 6600 GT as i wasnt even running it overclocked and just crapped out on me.To bad to because it was a great card well it ran

[Mochan]

What brand was your 6600GT, by the way? And why aren';t you sending it in for warranty?

[Mochan]

I thoughth you OC'd your 6600GT? It even says so you in your sig. =_=

If you want an under $400 card get the X850XT. If you can't find a cheap enough one the X850 Pro should do but I'm sort of partial to the little extra dollar for the XT since it has 4 more pixel shaders.

[BaneNWN]

What brand was your 6600GT, by the way? And why aren';t you sending it in for warranty?


Ya i had it o/c for benching only.I always had my cpu overclocked though.I had a PNY Verto brand.The only reason i never left my card o/c was for the simple fact that this particular brand for some reason doesnt have a temp gauge.I was stupid and threw the recipt out so no warrenty for me:(

[BaneNWN]

I read reviews for certain Nvidia Brands and heard nothing but good things from BFG,so im going to probably go with a geforce 6800 Ultra $ 400.

[Mochan]

Never throw away your receipts! Particularly for expensive hardware. Well, look on the bright side at least now you have a GF 6800 Ultra. ;) What brand was your 6600GT again? It wasn't Inno3D, was it?

Anyway I don't OC my Radeon either. I can only push it about 10% so it just wasn't worth it, and I don't have a temp gauge either so it seems a bit risky. I installed a huge custom sink on it (two-sided aluminum heatpipe sandwich) and it gets really hot, hotter than my CPU sink so I decided not to OC it.

I wonder why GPUs have such crappy cooling when the average GPU runs a lot hotter than the average CPU. There was a Zalman cooler that had a huge fan custom-installed that just made the GPU look like some monster. All GPUs should be cooled like that, LOL!

[BaneNWN]

This is the card i had.Stay away from at all costs.Is the only geforce 6600 GT without a temp gauge.If you buy Nvidia buy BFG.If im not mistaken BFG has a lifetime warrenty even though there a few dollars more its worth it.

http://www.pcuniverse.com/product.asp?pid=3101529&m_id=32

[BaneNWN]

Well i figured out i wont have quite $ 400 for a graphics card so instead i did quite a bit of research on the 6800 GT cards and found out they clock close to the 6800 Ultra speeds only like 3 mhz less then the 6800 Ultra.Well i found one of these puppies for only $ 30 more then what i paid for my 6600 GT.Man with the new Geforce 7800 out the prices are dropping nicely on these cards.


http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=321009

[Mochan]

I myself will likely be getting a 6800 GT for my end of year rig, they cost about $360 here though.A PNY card? I will stay away from PNY then.

There are certain brands I've learned to stay away from. For motherboards I will never touch another MSI board. I've owned tried three MSI boards and every single one of them gave me problems. The much maligned ECS actually did better, with only one ECS board ever crapping out on me among the three I tried and the only thing that broke was its keyboard socket. I still don't like ECS though because I can't OC well on them; too much of a budget board.

For videocards Inno3D I try to stay away from them but I have little choice if I want a GeForce since they're practically the only NVidia cards you can get around here. The first Inno3D card I bought crapped out (a GeForce 2) while the card that preceded it, a LeadTek GeForce 2, is still up and running, the only thing that gave out after 4 years was its heatsink fan (and I didn't even notice this for several weeks maybe months, it was running just fine with no artifacts on passive cooling!) The 2nd Inno card I bought lasted me a good 2 years with no issues though, a Ti4200 although I did a lot of modding on it (added a bunch of RAM sinks and replaced the stock cooler with a kick-ass copper sink).

Still I thought I'd break away from Inno so I got a Power Color Radeon next. Pretty happy with it except that the Radeon has texture flickering issues in a lot of games, and some of the polygons it throws out just clip weirdly against adjacent textures for some reason.

[DBS]

I think simply they don't care if the card craps out after a year or two as then you are forced to pick up...another card. Just my guess...

[BaneNWN]

Mochan or anyone else that knows alot about PC,S maybe you can help me out here.Ok my 6600 GT at times will work but at other times my screen freezes when i try to start a game.I know its a problem with the card as i have no problems with my geforce 3.I thought possibly it could be my power supply but now im sure its not as i unplugged my cd rom to save more power for the card and i still gett freezes.It does freeze as well on the desktop at times.One of my questions is i thought either a card will work or it wont at all?? I didnt know a graphics card would work sometimes but not others??I thought once a card is fried its fried.

I know its not the drivers as ive tried like 3 or 4 that ive used before and never had problems with.I was wondering could there be a configuration in windows that is causing this??Im at a loss here as to why this would work sometimes then all of a sudden not.

p.s. i almost forgot to mention my computer when it freezes will reboot or it will just stay a black screen

[BaneNWN]

How many watts is your PSU, anyway? It better be at least 480 watts. I've never owned a 6800GT but I know that insufficient power for your GPU will cause problems, such as making it crash when you try to juice it up (i.e. play games). Removing your CD-ROM won't help much since I think it's the actual current that it looks for, not necessarily some "extra savings" in power. If I remember correctly a 6800-class card should have a 480watt PSU.

BTW, a GPU will work even with damage. It's not just "fried or not fried." It will show its defects when the part of it handling those kinds of things is called on. For instance I had a GPU before that worked perfectly in 2D windows but whenever you fire up a 3D game you get all sorts of artificats and poor performance.

Anyway the first thing to do is to check your PSU's wattage.

I dont have a 6800 heh i still have the 6600 GT and my PSU is 450 watts.That should be good enough id think for my 6600 GT.

[Mochan]

How many watts is your PSU, anyway? It better be at least 480 watts. I've never owned a 6800GT but I know that insufficient power for your GPU will cause problems, such as making it crash when you try to juice it up (i.e. play games). Removing your CD-ROM won't help much since I think it's the actual current that it looks for, not necessarily some "extra savings" in power. If I remember correctly a 6800-class card should have a 480watt PSU.

BTW, a GPU will work even with damage. It's not just "fried or not fried." It will show its defects when the part of it handling those kinds of things is called on. For instance I had a GPU before that worked perfectly in 2D windows but whenever you fire up a 3D game you get all sorts of artificats and poor performance.

Anyway the first thing to do is to check your PSU's wattage.

[BaneNWN]

By the way when it works it works great when it doesnt it just doesnt play games at all my psu is 450 watt.Also i have the 6600 gt not the 6800 yet

[DBS]

The only way I can think of testing it to be sure is to put it in another machine and see how it acts. Is the fan working on it when it is on..just a thought.

[Mochan]

Ah I thought you got a new 6800GT already. So you just got another 6600GT? It should work perfectly then since your PC could already support a 6600GT before. Bane you may indeed want to check if the fan is on. If it isn't, when the load comes up the card could easily self destruct!

[BaneNWN]

Ah I thought you got a new 6800GT already. So you just got another 6600GT? It should work perfectly then since your PC could already support a 6600GT before. Bane you may indeed want to check if the fan is on. If it isn't, when the load comes up the card could easily self destruct!

hehe nah its the same card that broke.Yes i checked all fans there fine.Its just weird that sometimes it works and sometimes it dont.Ive noticed though that when it does work it underclocks itself to 300/900 instead of the stock 500/900 so i dunno what the problem is

[Mochan]

At this point it's likely hardware damage on the chip itself. Still it can't hurt to try tweaking and otherwise trying to fix it. If you are so inclined, maybe you can try looking for a new GPU sink (a nice big fat sink with a nice big fat fan like the new Zalman cooler) and take the original sink off. Apply a nice new layer of thermal goop and try it on.

If it doesn't work, at least you now have a nice new cooler for your 6800GT when it arrives.