Hey is this a good card...radeon saphire 9600xt? I picked it up for like 50 in ebay used. All its going to be used is for internet use and light gaming use like pogo or popcap. It has 128 meg ram and 400 mhz clock and 300 mhx ddr I think. Let me know as Im thinking its at least better than a hp with onboard ram.
I have one of these, with 256MB, as my main graphics board on this rig. It plays Doom3, FarCry, Halo, HalfLife2 etc. pretty well. It has the hardware shaders for full DirectX 9.0c support, the ATi RV360 core @ 500MHz and 300MHz memory (600DDR). It uses 76 million transistors @ 0.13micron (130 nanometer) process technology size. This is the same as my Athlon CPU :^) Newer Athlon64 CPUs have gone to 90 nanometer size (better - less expensive, less electricity, less heat) and newer Radeons have done the same. Anyway, the 9600XT has 4 pixel pipelines with 2 vertex shaders and 1 pixel shader, v2.0, each. A new Radeon 1900 has something like 16 pipelines with 3 vertex shaders each, v3.0, that's more serious (but so's the price). The 9600XT has only 128-bit memory bus width. 256-bit is serious. But the combination yields ~9500MB/s memory bandwidth still, which is okay and matches the overall design pretty well. It claims to do 2000 MPixels and 2000 MTexels /second, dunno if that's good... There ya go Ozzy, check that out. You got a good deal I'd say if it works good. Plus, notice your onboard HP video will cough up some memory - only 8MB or whatever but some use 16MB or even 64MB, every little bit counts ;^) So ya did good.
Nah it aint for a hp comp. I was just using that as a example. This card will be going in a msi k8n neo platinum nforce 3 board with amd athlon 64 3000+ proc I just built for my parents. But the s3 savage 2000 agp card wasnt cutting it. I got that card for free, but when ya highlighted something it would bogged it down and freeze it up. And I dont need my mom bitching. But I figured this was a good alternative to a 6 yr old card I got for free..Lol! Thanks to all. I feel better now. Besides like I said this is just for surfing office work and light games. I been running the comp for a week now and it seems to run nicely. Just the vid card was lacking. I was encoding with vso divxtodvd at bout 45 frames per sec only 15 or so frames less than my first comp in my sig with the 3700 san diego. So I dont think its too bad and it beat a hp 2.8 pentium 4 which encoded at 15 frames per sec..LOL! But nah dont say the nasty word hp. After getting into the repair buisness and building I will never touch another store bought paper weight. :> Thansk!
