AGP card fanless under $200?

vincentfox · Post by **vincentfox** » Mon Oct 10, 2005 12:08 pm

I started looking around at video cards and things are not so clear to me.

Would anyone out there have an ATI 9600XT with Zalman 80D-HP on it that could throw out some numbers? Wondering what that card might overclock to and what kind of numbers it would reach?

Have also thought about 9800Pro units but it looks like even lower core speeds and about same RAM speeds? Is really a major diff in games like BF2 between 9600XT and 9800Pro? Looking to run at 1280x1024 with at least some goodies turned on.

From what I am reading hard to find NVidia 6600/6600GT in this price range and with easy cooling options. I have a Zalman FB123 unit cooling my CPU so having the ZM80D sticking up really high would conflict with it.

york · Post by **york** » Mon Oct 10, 2005 1:47 pm

Zalman cooled 9600 xt at stock speeds will not run BF2 in anything better than 800x600 low/mid settings depending on how you tweak it. I do not own a 9800 pro so I can help you on that one. Sometimes BF2 resets my graphics to all high and 1280x960, it looks real nice for that 2 minutes before it reboots.

StarfishChris · Post by **StarfishChris** » Mon Oct 10, 2005 2:32 pm

york wrote:Zalman cooled 9600 xt at stock speeds will not run BF2 in anything better than 800x600 low/mid settings depending on how you tweak it. I do not own a 9800 pro so I can help you on that one. Sometimes BF2 resets my graphics to all high and 1280x960, it looks real nice for that 2 minutes before it reboots.

My experience is different - I had a plain 9600 with the considerably smaller passive heatsink, and with a slow slot-blower could overclock it 15%. It ran BF2 well at a mix of mid/low at 1024x768. Due to its design I'm sure the Zalman cooler and the XT will give you better performance than that.

As far as I know the 9800 Pro is much better than the 9600 XT, but it uses twice as much power (about 55 watts). I don't know how well the Zalman performs but you may need some additional cooling if you overclock it.

SebRad · Post by **SebRad** » Mon Oct 10, 2005 2:45 pm

Hi, my brief experience of a "standard" 6600 was that it was a bit more powerful than my 9600pro. That puts it in much the same ball park as the 9600XT. The 9800pro/XT and 6600GT are in a different league, 50%-100% faster, IIRC the 6600GT will outperform the 9800 in most tests but they're in the same sort of ballpark. I think the next (small) step up is to the 6800 and X800, then (larger) step to x800pro, 6800GT and X800XL.
www.anandtech.com has lots of video card reviews where you can compare performance across generations for yourself.
Gigabyte AGP cards (search for "silent pipe"). Whether you can find them for sale...
Good luck, Sebastien

threevok · Post by **threevok** » Mon Oct 10, 2005 2:51 pm

http://forums.silentpcreview.com/viewto ... highlight=