OLD ATI cards compared..........

D

Dr. Righteous

2[H]4U
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Aug 1, 2007
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Greets guys.
For some of you guys that have been using Radeons since the beginning maybe you remember the distinction here.

Radeon 8500LE and Radeon 9000pro.

My son's PC is a old pentium 4 2Ghz with a AGP 4x slot. I was thinking over all it wouldn't be a bad DX 9 systems with a descent card. But I was able to dig around and find a better card that he had in stalled. It currently has a 8500LE. I dug around in my PC grave yard and came up with a 9000pro.
I don't remember what the differences are here.

Any ideas??

Also since the board only supports AGP 4x, is it worth spending a little green and getting say a Radeon HD2400 card? They are pretty cheap now a days.
 
Ati 9600 pro. Hands down best videocard ever made. If you look around they've been unloading them around the net for 10-20$. I played Counter-strike:source and HL2 on it no sweat.
 
piscian18 said:
Ati 9600 pro. Hands down best videocard ever made. If you look around they've been unloading them around the net for 10-20$. I played Counter-strike:source and HL2 on it no sweat.
Click to expand...

What are you talking about? The 9500 Pro was a better card most of the time, and the 9700 Pro blew the 9600 Pro away. 9700 Pro and 9800 Pro were the best cards ATI has ever made.
 
The best mid-range card ever made is a tie between the 9500Pro and the 8800GT. The 9600Pro was pushed out and promoted so heavily because ATI made a lot more for each one sold compared to the 9500Pro. The 9500 used the exact same chip as a 9700, with it basically cut down in half. You could even use a modded BIOS on the Non-Pro 9500s and unlock 9700 performance.
 
Dr. Righteous said:
Radeon 8500LE and Radeon 9000pro.

My son's PC is a old pentium 4 2Ghz with a AGP 4x slot. I was thinking over all it wouldn't be a bad DX 9 systems with a descent card.
Click to expand...

Both of those cards are DirectX 8.1 only :( I recall the 8500 being faster than the 9000 but at the same time I also seem to recall the 8500LE being the cut-down version of the 8500, so the 9000 may in fact be faster. The difference won't be huge however and both cards will be very slow, most games now won't even support DirectX8.1

If you are looking at used cards you might also look for other cards like a FireGL X1 for example. It's identical to a 9700Pro and is DirectX9 and works with aero in windows 7 even. I recently got one on ebay for $7.

arthur_tuxedo said:
Be careful not to plug an AGP 8X card into a 4X slot. The voltages are different.
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AGP is actually fully backward compatible in that regard. I have two Dual AthlonMP systems with 4x slots that both have 8x cards in them without any issues.
 
GotNoRice said:
AGP is actually fully backward compatible in that regard. I have two Dual AthlonMP systems with 4x slots that both have 8x cards in them without any issues.
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Correct. I remember using both a 6800GT and an X800 XT in a motherboard that only had an AGP 4x slot.
 
Agp only has problems when your going backwards when its the old 2x slots and back. 3.3v 2x slots. Videocards after 4x dropped support for 3.3v. 4x/8x 1.5v slots. Any card should work in a 4x slot ;).
 
man those were the days..constant upgrades and new cards that did more than 1 fps faster than last years model.
the 9700 pro was the killer in its day.

and I also remember the dell bs .
Their 8500 pros were just the cheap 8500LE cards flashed to say 8500 pro in the hardware tab.
same underclocked bs as the 8500le.
Hell I remember when they first came out with the LE models and some places were calling them the super cards and were higher price than the standard 8500 cards ROFL
 
sparks said:
man those were the days..constant upgrades and new cards that did more than 1 fps faster than last years model.
the 9700 pro was the killer in its day.

and I also remember the dell bs .
Their 8500 pros were just the cheap 8500LE cards flashed to say 8500 pro in the hardware tab.
same underclocked bs as the 8500le.
Hell I remember when they first came out with the LE models and some places were calling them the super cards and were higher price than the standard 8500 cards ROFL
Click to expand...

Before the Radeon I had the dual 3DFX setup. They only did 3D and not 2D. You had to have external pass thorugh cables for it. MAN, those were the days.

If I kept all the computer gear I owned over the years I would have quite a museum. I started in computer in 1983.
Didn't get my first IBM compatible PC (clone as it was called back then) until 1989. A flaming 486DX 33Mhz. A power house for the day. LOL!
 
Elledan said:
I didn't even know they made 4xxx-series AGP cards :) I think it'll quite suck on such a slow bus, though. Would check benchmarks if I could find any.
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While you would think so, I mostly doubt it.

First off, even before the days of AMD's Rialto bridge (which enabled AIBs to mate early PCIe-only GPUs to AGP PCBs), few, if any, AGP 8x cards (from anybody) used all the bandwidth that AGP 8x had to offer.

Second, I have empirical data.

The last AGP 8x card I bought for my own use is a rare-air ATI-branded Radeon X1650 Pro AGP 8x that was sold to me at Best Buy B&M in July 2005. (The card is an odd duck in that AMD had already bought ATI; what made it odder still is that this is one of the few ATI-branded cards to be sold in North America that ATI didn't package or distribute - it was packaged and distributed by Visiontek. The card is, in fact, still in use, though in Mom's PC, not mine.)

While the motherboard I had at the time (ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe) did support AGP 8x, Mom's current motherboard (an older MSI P4 mobo based on the Intel 845E) only supports AGP 4x. However, the WEI graphics subscore didn't change between the two motherboards (not in Vista or in Windows 7). Gaming performance didn't change, either.

Has this changed any since?
 
Dr. Righteous said:
Before the Radeon I had the dual 3DFX setup. They only did 3D and not 2D. You had to have external pass thorugh cables for it. MAN, those were the days.

If I kept all the computer gear I owned over the years I would have quite a museum. I started in computer in 1983.
Didn't get my first IBM compatible PC (clone as it was called back then) until 1989. A flaming 486DX 33Mhz. A power house for the day. LOL!
Click to expand...

I had two different single 3dfx cards (I still have the second, a 12 MB Diamond Monster 3D II Revision E), and usually paired them with ATI graphics cards (AIWs at the time). While 3dfx was known more for GLide (and especially because of Quake), I pointed out that the Voodoo Graphics (and later Voodoo II) would also perform as decent Direct3D accelerators (albeit with only 16-bit color).

My two favorite games at the time, in fact, were both D3D (not GLide), one of which was a snarky Descent clone from Acclaim Entertainment/Probe Entertainment called Forsaken.

boot Magazine had been using the demo of Forsaken in their 3D graphics testing because it supported both D3D and GLide (though the shipped game would, in fact, drop GLide support). The Forsaken demo would remain a staple of boot (and later Maximum PC) testing through the VLbus/PCI battle and even through the early days of AGP.

While Acclaim would go by the wayside, I still play Forsaken today (it will install just fine even on Windows 7 x64, though you need the 1.01 patch to play on that OS).
 
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