Radeon 9800SE - any gotchas?

[nudata 10]

The Radeon 9800SE (128mb) is on Newegg at $104 incl shippment. Are there any serious issues with either Radeon in general or this card in particular? Up to now I have always used Nividia.THANKS,Dick Boley @KLBE

[Guest baksteen33]

Hi Dick, I think your suspicion is about the gotcha is correct. The 9800 is suggesting a great card but SEs are usually stripped in half originals. Strip the 9800 in half and you more or less get a 9600. Here's a link to a site which lists Ati's GPU specs (if you scroll to the bottom you'll find a link to the same for Geforces): http://www.rojakpot.com/default.aspx?locat...&var1=88&var2=0I'ld recommend a 128-bit card (pls note, not 128MB) for upto 1024x resolutions, beyond that a 256-bit will do better. Hence, a non-SE 9800pro or better/alike for 1280x. All in all it depends on the CPU too; combining a 9800pro with a 1400-class CPU will signify not being able to take full advantage of the display adapter. Also, if you i.e. check the difference between a Geforce4 Ti and newer 6600's, you'll see there aren't any significant technical differences really. They mainly differ in the supported DX- and shader versions. So, if looking at FS, you'll likely not see much of improvement either if choosing that as an upgrade. Just to give you an example. Hope this adds to thoughts, good luck and kind regards Jaap

[nudata 10]

Thanks for your input. The interesting thing is that my current GeForce 400mx 64mb (several years old) gives 20+fps in the rural areas I "fly". In fact FPS of 30+ (measured by FRAPS) are quite common. However, I cannot use anti-alaising, or 3D clouds. I have lived with that. My personal philosophy is to stay about a year or more behind the latest stuff. So when I installed 600mb of nice new photo real of Alaska (Georender) the lowered frame rate and texture loads made flight unpleasent at times. Therefore, I am installing a faster disk while I type on another PC. I have also decided to go with the 9800SE 128mb understanding that it is certainly not a 9800pro or XT or whatever they call them. However, it should be noticeably better than my GeForce 400mx 64mb. I am not seeking to have the fastest and pay a premium of 3 times the cost of this card. I am very sure that the latest card will not run 3 times faster or be 3 times clearer.Once agin thanks for the input.

[Guest baksteen33]

Hi Dick, you're welcome. That will indeed be a big upgrade looking where you're coming from. Good thinking. Since the SE has a couple of little advantages over a 9600XT it's a good choice and as long as you don't ask too much in case of wanting to use 1280x resolutions (and you have a fairly powerful CPU). FYI, I once compared a 9600pro and 9800pro @1024x, the difference was nada, zip, zilch! Only after switching to 1280x the 9800pro outperformed the 9600pro by ca 40%. Both machines were running 3GHz P4s back then (now I've got an AMD64). I wish you mucho fun with your new adapter, good luck and kind regards Jaap