DiD i make the wrong choice??? advice needed its killin' me here o.O

ins4n17yins4n17y Cabanatuan City, Philippines Icrontian
edited November 2006 in Hardware
i want to be a casual gamer. And despite being in that category of not having the latest hardware, i believe i have good extremely modded hardware (i'll post my rig's PICs in the forum soon) to play my games at near max settings:

(WoW, CS, HL, HL-2, Unreal Tournament 2004, Doom3, F.E.A.R.)

with often good effect...i checked benchmarks on the internet and i have no need to get a pci-e. on top of that i've went over to a buddys house on their new system to see what games look like with max settings. its seems to me that i prefer trilinear filtering maxed & ansisotropic maxed rather than enable AA. with AA disabled, i found that most of the jaggies played at 1280x1024 resolution were not visible at all.

My system rig so far is:

Athlon XP-M 2600+ oc/ed to 2.647GHz on AiR (prime stable)
2GB RAM (2x512MB BH-5 OCZ + 1xCorsair 3500LLPRO 1GB)
750GB Seagate SATA-II Barracuda 7200.10 TCQ
Audigy 2ZS
3Com 3C905C-TX Ethernet Adapter

so keeping my current rig with the benchmarks, i should do fine with either a AIW-X800XT or a AIW-X800XL. I clicked the 'pay now' for the order for the AIW X800XT hoping i made the right choice.

did i really? or is it true the xl has more pixel pipes than the xt?

Comments

  • LeonardoLeonardo Wake up and smell the glaciers Eagle River, Alaska Icrontian
    edited November 2006
    Athlon XP-M 2600+ oc/ed to 2.647GHz on AiR
    Sorry, I can't address your VGA question, but that's a dandy OC on the Athlon.
  • ins4n17yins4n17y Cabanatuan City, Philippines Icrontian
    edited November 2006
    Leonardo wrote:
    Sorry, I can't address your VGA question, but that's a dandy OC on the Athlon.
    thanks leonardo =)

    thing is how about someone explain to me about the differences in a nutshell between a pixel and vertex shader and how they affect performance?

    the aiw x800xt is supposed to be better no?
  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    edited November 2006
    The XT is the best card in the X800 series. It's a fine card.

    Pixel and Vertex Shaders
  • edited November 2006
    You won't be playing FEAR on max settings but the others should be fine. You will be missing some shader detail in some newer games too but thats probably the best card you could have gone for considering the rest of the machine.

    Only other one I would have recommended would have been the Nvidia 6800GT
  • ins4n17yins4n17y Cabanatuan City, Philippines Icrontian
    edited November 2006
    Thrax wrote:
    The XT is the best card in the X800 series. It's a fine card.

    Pixel and Vertex Shaders

    thanks for the wiki. i'll disregard what my friend said over AiM about the aiw-x800xl having more pixel and vertex shaders and cheaper only because of lower clockspeed.
  • ins4n17yins4n17y Cabanatuan City, Philippines Icrontian
    edited November 2006
    rapture-IC wrote:
    You won't be playing FEAR on max settings but the others should be fine. You will be missing some shader detail in some newer games too but thats probably the best card you could have gone for considering the rest of the machine.

    Only other one I would have recommended would have been the Nvidia 6800GT

    missing detail? is it because it doesn't support shader model 3.0?

    i thought of that too, but i wanted a fm/tv tuner and don't have any room left in pci slots for a card. as far as i know, ati's aiw x800 series is the best agp solution for those who don't wanna jump on the pci-e bandwagon yet. like me! :p the 6800gt is a damn good card tho =)

    besides i just love playing my movies on ATi hardware with minimal cpu usage.
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