ANYONE HAVE THE RADEON 9700 ? IF SO, HOW IS IT?

[Guest]

Hi,I was thinking of purchasing the VisionTek Xstasy GeForce4 Ti 4600. Yesterday, I see the review on the Avsim front page regarding the match up between that and the ATI Radeon 9700. The Radeon beat the Visiontek by quite a margin. Now it looks as if the Radeon would be the better card for about the same price.I now have a ATI Radeon 64MB DDR card and want to upgrade to the either one of the two cards mentioned. Any feedback or experiences out there regarding these two fine cards would be deeply appreciated.Sincerely,Hans

[Noel 4,486]

You may not want to purchase the vision tek as they are going OOB at least I think that's what I read a bit ago.The 9700 Pro is THE performance king now and for the next several months.I'm getting one!Noel

[Guest]

Anybody tried the radeon in FS2k2 or CFS2?? Cause I'm pushing the button tomorrow: Standard Features: Hi-Performance Heatsink/CPU Cooling Fan Standard 1.44MB Floppy Drive Optimized to run your favorite software Performance Benchmarks Documentation Personalized Owner's Manual FREE Custom Alienware

[JimmiG 244]

I have not seen any benchmarks of FS2002 or CFS2.Typically flightsims are CPU limited, which means that a better graphics card won't make a big difference. However you will probably be able to use a better FSAA mode and a higher Anisotropic Filtering setting and still get good FPS.I'm getting a 9700 soon, to replace my GF3. But it will probably take a while before the 9700 cards are available here in Sweden.

[Hornit 3]

Im kind of tired of hearing the cpu limiting thing. The reality is these new cards allow you to crank up the details without frame rate loss. I mean ALL of them. Yes Flight sims are CPU limited, but If I can crank up my details and lose NO frames than that is a big improvement in my book. I would bet most actually do get a few fps increase with these cards in most new sims.Hornit

[Guest]

I agree with Hornet. The video cards do a great deal in pic quality and I've been impressed with the radeon color and not so impressed with nvidia color. I just pushed the buttons and before I even got off the alienware site, the phone rang confirming the order. I asked about the 9700s performance in FS2k2 and he indicated that radeon had tested the card with the sim and that all was fine. We'll see. In Two weeks, I'll be testing it for myself. I hate spending money.

[Noel 4,486]

My new home-spun machine:Lian Li PC-68 all aluminum case w/ 431W Enermax Whisper PSS: $205Yamaha LightSpeed 40x CDRW: $105Toshiba 16x DVD rom: $38 (!!)Teac FDD -- $14Seagate Cheetah X15-36LP 18GB, 3.6ms access, 1.2M MTBF, 5yr war: $209Tekram DC-390U3W Ultra160 host controller: $185WDC 40GB 7200 rpm ATA100: $80Mobo TBD! w/ 6 channel audio, LAN, ATA133 RAID (what the hey!) $150 ish . . .512mb PC1066 or RIMM4200 RDRAM: $315 ish . . .Pentium 4 Northwood 2.8GHz: I'm buyin when she drops below $400ATI Radeon 9700 Pro 128: $339Total $2040 + tax n license = ~$2250.This hummer will overclock to at least 3200MHz yeeha!!!!!!!!!(using my Sony GDMF400 19" yeah)Noel

[Guest]

I hear Hornit is going to buy one too. It's been five years since I bought my Dell PII450 with the TNT1v4400 card when Falcon4 first came out. I upgraded it a couple years ago to a PIII800. It's about time. I'm illiterate when it comes to handling hardware components so I decided it's best to let the experts do it for me. I take my machine to the shop to change drivers. I hear the intels are suppose to drop in prices next month. We'll see. Shipping was free this month.

[Steve Cannell 4]

I have never been completely happy with the Geforce's FSAA as compared to the Voodoo 5's. Those jaggies and swimmy lines drive me crazy !!Yes, the 9700 is said to give more fps when in FSAA modes but I think I'll wait till there's a card that gives both quality and performance.I was hoping to hear good things about the new matrix but nothing yet. :-(SteveCYYZ

[Noel 4,486]

Are you kidding Steve? Take a look at these numbers with highest quality FSAA and Anisotropic Filtering. There is plenty of info about Parhelia but it doesn't seem all that good!Noel

[Hornit 3]

Steve, I think the 9700 IS going to be THE card for quite some time and WILL give us speed and beauty! Hard OCP just put up a review of this card (9700) and they said it should get two of thier "top pick" awards! They specifically said its FSAA is superior to NVidia's and image quality was superb. We are talking full blown 4XFSAA at 1024/1200/1600 res with 8x and 16x aniso, this seems pretty darn good to me. I have done the rivatuner GF tweak utility thing and have to admit, any card that can do -1-2 LOD and have 32 or 64 tap for the aniso looks pretty darn good, not quite as good as the V5 but nice fps and EVERYTHING turned on. The V5 just can't do that. Having said all that, Im gonna get a decent GF4 ti 4200 now and O-clock it to 4400 speeds and wait til the price on the 9700 drops to around 200$. Im guessing this will be next spring sometime, by then I'll have that P4 2.4gig machine also :) Saves me lots o $ upgrading this way.Hornit

[Guest Eagle92395]

MGDBOTTLED, WOW, what a system you're ordering!! I have roughly the same setup and I think you'll be impressed. Sooooo much fun :) One thing though, if you're going to $2200, why not go for XP Pro? The price is a bit more, BUT, the advance networking features in XP Pro are really nice. Also it offers a bit more for the power tweaker in you :) If you have no reason for a network (I use a router with cable and 3 other PC's hooked to it) then XP Home is just fine though. Just a little side note.

[Guest]

The price difference was $61 between the Home version and the Pro. I asked a network guru on another site and he explained the differences between the two versions in detail. I too have a router (a linksys)for four computers with two computers (a win98 and Home XP machine) right now on a cable modem. This will make the third. I came to the conclusion that I wouldn't need all the advanced network stuff and security that the Pro version offers since I'll only need to transfer an occasional file every now and then. (aircraft folders and various zipped files to begin with) My understanding was that XP Home would do that with no extra hassles. Now, I just have to run that network wizard and figure out how to go about accomplishing that simple task.

[Guest]

Before purchasing anything you should read online the best and most in-depth articles you can on that item.Well, in this instance, here is one of them. Granted, its not FS2002 specific, but it doesn't really need to be to get the information you need.Warning: this article has more information on the 9700 Pro that you could possibly ever, ever want to know :-). It may also take forever and a day to load for you modem users since its graphically heavy and all on one page(I hate that).Despite the above: its an excellent piece of work and I highly recommend it for potential 9700 Pro buyers. In particular, the Comanche benchmarks have a lot in common with FS2002 as far as where bottlenecks are and what a top-end card can do:http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/radeon/r9700pro.htmlTake care,Elrondhttp://members.rogers.com/eelvish/Boycott-RIAA.jpeg]"A musician without the RIAA, is like a fish without a bicycle."[/font://http://members.rogers.com/eelvish/B...cle."[/b][/font

[Guest Eagle92395]

Sounds like you've done your research then :) Since I run a dedicated server for another game, I like having the extra security with the Pro version. Also, you won't need to run the network wizard...XP seems to be excellent at networking. I just fired them all up, and they all detected each other and it worked perfectly :) Good luck!