Med spec vid card

[Weta43]

Hi - question from the cheap seats;

I have an ATI9600 card & thought I might get an Nvidia 6600GT.

The chip is an intel 3.2Ghz (no overclocking), 2Gig ram & LO is sitting on a 120Gig SATA drive.

Would the change make much diff to Lock-On ?

I've got a board with only AGP & the 3.2 is the last chip I'll get for this socket so I don't want to go overboard on a card that will stay with this board. The 6600GT is pretty affordable, but not if it won't make any noticable difference...

[Guest EVIL-SCOTSMAN]

it will pwn your 9600, but saying that, i have heard that the 9600 was a real decent card, and that people who have used ati cards then moved to nvidia, have complained about the picture quality and AA quality. its supposdly sharper on ati cards, but as for game playing, the 6600gt is a real good card for its price.

 

probably wont really notice a big difference in lockon with it, but in other games you will.

[Weta43]

Complain, complain...

[Weta43]

Thanks Evil - was just having a bitch as you were writing cause I want to go get it NOW!

Had an Nvidia card before this & was happy enough with it (my brother's still using it)

Never run AA on my card anyway so that's not such an issue - just run it at 16 x 12.

Thanks again.

 

THe 9600 is fine most of the time - everything on high except the water (low - cause I like it better that way anyway) & the vis range - med.

It's fine till I get to a mission with full overcast sky (or full overcast sky, a big city & lots of planes), at which point I eject & head back to the settings screen....

This is where I was hoping for some improvement - overcast & cities. The overcast is videocard I guess, but the cities are probably CPU - yes?

[Guest EVIL-SCOTSMAN]

yea, cities are cpu aswell i am afraid, you will notice some improvement with the 6600gt, but you will notice it more in other games that you play.

 

I would say get it now, you wont look back ;) cuz it does kill the 9600.

 

Just make sure its the 6600gt version you get and not the 6600.

[Weta43]

Thanks

[rasputin]

Hey Evil Scotsman,

I was thinking about a 7800GT to replace my 9800 Pro but you got me thinkin'. I *love* the IQ on my ATi card...mebbe I should look at the 800/850/1800 series. I'd really hate to drop 300+ and not be happy with the AA quality in Lomac 'cause that's pretty important to me. I wonder if that's how Nvidia (at least in some small part) gets thier performance advantage...although I reckon more pixel pipelines doesn't hurt. :p

[Weta43]

You are right Evil, much faster in other games(Q IV looks good!), not a whole lot faster in LO except with overcast skies. Less pretty in LO. At 16bit the ATI still lookes nice, but the 6600 LOOKS like it's running reduced colours. Also there are some odd grafics effects happening so I'm in the middle of grabbing some new drivers (screen interleaving can be seen when moving my head fast sideways, & the heat-blur appears to act like some sort of lense - when I parked up I could see closeups of some other parts of the runway in the envelope of the heat blur, & teh shadow of the nose of the plane - very odd )

Also had a couple of lock-ups, which I never had with either of my previous boards...

[D17S]

Weta,

 

What's your powersupply?

 

2 months ago, I got that new Theromright heat pipe and got my little ol 2.8 up to 3.4, but needed a big time CPU volt bump up. Was runnin' smooth though that 6600GT. Just put a new 6800GT and a hardrive raid and started to get all sorts of artifacts, then bluescreens, then lockups.UGH! Dropped the CPU overvolt (and clock) back down and all's well again. Suspect that 6800 took me one volt over the line. It can happen with a Vcard upgrade. That 6800 really didn't do much though for a 2.8-3.2 rig with a 17-19" monitor at ordinary resolutions though. That 6600GT is really the trick with these non-uber systems. I think you chose well. Now to get it to run. Think PS.

[Weta43]

Cheers D17S,

PS - Some 400W thing that I put in a couple of weeks ago 'cause the last one started smoking while I was on line here (literaly - right there while I'm typing. Bad, bad manners. Had to go...)

I have an app that monitors voltage & temp etc & the V's look fine.

Had to get another fan to dump the heat from the video card though (& modified the case - reversed the direction of the extra fan that was there & put a grid of holes over the CPU & knocked 10 degrees off the CPU while in game, which is good 'cause my girlfriend could hear the CPU fan in the other room once the game was going & wasn't happy about it)

I got some new drivers for the card it's going much better. Heat blur works fine & mostly it's running fine - occasional little lags in the game and a couple of brief lockups - not only in L.O. - could be that they were there before but I didn't notice them with the lower FPS.

FPS over cities is almost unchanged, but where before it was imposible to fly at the settings I usually run with a fully overcast sky, now the FPS are pretty much the same with an overcast sky as they are without (dodgy low over a big city & nice everwhere else ... Overcast, rain & thunderstorms are V. nice now I can actually use them ...

Thanks again for the help,

[D17S]

Glad it's going now. That initial upgrade I did from a 4200 to the 6600 was like magic. I run that Oil Terminal, A-10 mission that came with the game as my benchmark. I load up unlimited ammo and get the whole terminal ablaze. The 6600 gets 1-8 fps as I fly through the inferno. The 6800Gt get 1-8 fps too. Looks like my P4/2.8 CPU is the bottle neck.

 

I was a big fan of monitoring volts to forcast a pending PS overload, but now I'm not so sure now. I was fully expecting volts to decrease as the PS became overloaded. I wanted to see volts drop off as the PS hit its limit. But it didn't happen that way. With the 6800/raid addition, the volts stayed good, (perfect actually) even as the the whole system displayed low amp symptoms. Looks like my PS was current limiting . . . capping maximum amps, but leaving the voltage within spec. I'm going to just get the baddest PS I can find and then install a halon extinguishing system in my case . . with a big red button. You say they will actually smoke? Very bad manners.

 

The easy PS choice is the OCZ 520 powerstream. I figure for 100 bucks, I can put the PS mystery to bed . . . and move on to . . . oh let's see. . . GPU heat pipe heatsinks? It never ends, at least let's hope it won't.

 

Good luck.

[Weta43]

Hi All,

Like I said higher up, new drivers fixed most of the problems I was having with this card, but - every so often when changing from internal to external or more often from external to internal views - say F10 to F1, I get lockups that I never had with the old ATI card.

The game (& sound) continues, but the image doesn't refresh.

After a few seconds the image jumps to where the game is up to now & runs smoothly, but the controls (including TIR) won't work for another few seconds, then they come back & all is good again (as long as I haven't hit the ground or water inbetween).

Does this sound like a hardware conflict to you? or textures/scenes being reloaded.

I think the CPU is still cranking along 'cause the game events & sound continues at about the right pace, but the fact that the video & all controls lock separately made me wonder

It sounds a bit like what was happening to some people when they were running some particular sound cards on boards with integrated sound.

[Annihilator911]

yea, cities are cpu aswell i am afraid, you will notice some improvement with the 6600gt, but you will notice it more in other games that you play.

 

I would say get it now, you wont look back ;) cuz it does kill the 9600.

 

Just make sure its the 6600gt version you get and not the 6600.

 

look who is talking :) the guy with dual 7800GTX!!!

i got 6600gt and i am gonna upgrade to geforce7 after g71 comes out and that will make all the nvidia cards cheaper.

[Weta43]

Any ideas about the freezes

[emenance]

Hi - question from the cheap seats;

I have an ATI9600 card & thought I might get an Nvidia 6600GT.

The chip is an intel 3.2Ghz (no overclocking), 2Gig ram & LO is sitting on a 120Gig SATA drive.

Would the change make much diff to Lock-On ?

I've got a board with only AGP & the 3.2 is the last chip I'll get for this socket so I don't want to go overboard on a card that will stay with this board. The 6600GT is pretty affordable, but not if it won't make any noticable difference...

went from 9800 pro to 6600 gt and saw a very big difference, it kills a 9800 pro dead the faster memory ddr3 on the 6600 gt speaks for itself. in addition to that can you say Bandwidth?

 

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/vid...27gpu2_25.html

 

video cards performance up to xt pe

[Weta43]

Cheers Em,

I bought it a while back & yes runs a much bettter FPS when clouds atc around, but I wondered if anyone knew what might be causing the problem I mentioned above?

[Annihilator911]

u should get 6800gt cause almost all 6600gt's have problems like my. my keeps freezing when it gets hot.

[Weta43]

See that's the thing, it doesn't freeze unless I change views. Maybe I'll try being a bit more thorough about closing down AV programs to see if it's just while LO re-opens all the scenery files (that's another thing - the loading of scenes takes longer now when spawned & looking around - water, land, textures )

[emenance]

maybe its a page file issue, try setting your page file to a permenant size , like if you got a gig , set to 2500 or 2.5 gig min and max. Xp sucks at handling big games like this one. It needs tweaked.

[emenance]

u should get 6800gt cause almost all 6600gt's have problems like my. my keeps freezing when it gets hot.

 

Yeah id blame heat if I was 30 min into a game or something. I have never seen a freeze since getting XP under control. But Ive been sent back to the desk top once in FEAR. That was about 40 min into the game and I was thinking heat there. I think another reason why was fan was really starting to get loud as I have been running comp with sides off i could tell this. I am trying to finish a better cooling set up for the card right now.

[Guest Cali]

Hey Evil Scotsman,

I was thinking about a 7800GT to replace my 9800 Pro but you got me thinkin'. I *love* the IQ on my ATi card...mebbe I should look at the 800/850/1800 series. I'd really hate to drop 300+ and not be happy with the AA quality in Lomac 'cause that's pretty important to me. I wonder if that's how Nvidia (at least in some small part) gets thier performance advantage...although I reckon more pixel pipelines doesn't hurt. :p

 

I had a 9800pro for about 2 days, my brother sent the wrong card. When I got my X800pro there was a huge difference. Going from a 9800pro to a 7800GT all I can say is you wont be dissappointed.

 

My cards went like this 9200se ----> 9600pro (I was very happy with the FPS and more eye candy) ----> X800pro (same as with the 9600pro-very happy)

[Shaman]

I have 6600GT and no overheating problems. In stress maximum temperature I achieved was around 66*C. Own custom 80x80mm fan, though. The card is Gigabyte GV-N66T128VP with two large radiators on both sides.

(radiator on the other side is bigger - less flat)

I'm very happy with it, and didn't have to spend a fortune.

 

Card works with my Athlon 2500+ OC@3200+ (200x11), on Abit AN7 board. The funniest thing is that it works on some noname crappy power supply that roughly has 350W I guess (if not 300W).

[emenance]

dang wish I had that heatsink then i could just screw my 80mm fan on it. You know its interesting how alot of people were saying that the 6600 gt was really held back by the nforce 2 and kinda woke up on a 64 bit chipset.

[Shaman]

I bought this card (GV-N66T128VP) especially because I was impressed by its radiators. I also had a spare 80x80x20mm fan I wanted to use for something.

Because my PC is rather economic class this was also the right choice I guess.

My mainboard has nForce2 chipset. When I upgraded from GF4Ti and run DOOM3 (still my top3 game) again I felt like waking up again. I think this mostly happens each time you upgrade your computer.

[rasputin]

I had a 9800pro for about 2 days, my brother sent the wrong card. When I got my X800pro there was a huge difference. Going from a 9800pro to a 7800GT all I can say is you wont be dissappointed.

 

My cards went like this 9200se ----> 9600pro (I was very happy with the FPS and more eye candy) ----> X800pro (same as with the 9600pro-very happy)

 

Hi Cali yeah man the difference performance-wise is night and day. I also like that digital vibrance control, used in moderation it brings in a really rich color palette to Lomac imho. The only thing is that my AA isn't so hot (even at 8XAA/1280X1024) anytime I see the color black...like on an aircraft when the sun is on the opposite side...or on an aircraft's anti-glare panel. To be fair though, I think it's my new LCD monitor. I'm gonna test it with an older CRT I have lying around here in my computer room to check the differences.