Is geforce fx 5700 nvidia equivalent to ati 9600xt?

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VERiON
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Is geforce fx 5700 nvidia equivalent to ati 9600xt?

Post by VERiON » Fri Sep 02, 2005 12:55 am

I would like to buy 3d card.
I'm a occasional gamer, who can live with playing @ low 800x600 resolution.
9600xt seems to be ideal candidate. Enough computing power (for me) and low power discipation - 9W idle, 23W burn.

But I won't buy ati card because I have linux installed. Ati provides drivers for linux, but I found few posts that drives quality is far from perfect in linux (i.e. on the same system: running win - 40fps, running lin - 20 fps).

Don't get me wrong - I like ati cards. I have now radeon 9100. And it is running excelent in linux - but only in 2d.

So I want to buy nVidia card, because they have full support for linux. They even provide overclocking (for me - underclocking) utility for linux.

I found on xbitlabs.com that geforce fx 5700 has power consumption: idle 10W, burn 25W which is comparable to 9600xt.

I also found a lot of benchmarks of that card. The thing is that in some benchmarks the cards are almost equal, but in the others 9600xt seems to be almost twice as fast as 5700.

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I know that 5700 is "little" outdated. I think that geforce 6800 is "new 9600xt" (best bang per watt). But it is running 17W idle and 39W burn. For me, most important is idle power disscipation, because I don't play often. I can live with extra fan @burn, because I'm using headphones when playing games.

---

conclusion:
What do you think - should I buy geforce fx 5700 (best non-ati card running 10W idle)? Or should I just forget about 9600xt/5700 and buy 6800 (only 7W more @ idle) even if I don't really need its power (and it cost twice as much).

scara
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Post by scara » Fri Sep 02, 2005 2:48 am

Even though you're only an occaisional gamer I'd still say go for the 6800. The 5700 won't be fast enough to play the more demanding new games, even at minimum settings, so you may have to buy a new card again quite soon.

Isn't there a 6800LE or something that consumes similar power to the 5700 at idle? That or a 6600 might be more suitable.

VERiON
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Post by VERiON » Fri Sep 02, 2005 12:53 pm

6600 actually consumes more power than 6800

But you have right about 6800 LE. It consumes little less power than 6800 mainly because of lower GPU clock.
Mayby I'll go that way.

6800 has also separate clock and voltage settings for 2D i 3D. Mayby i can edit this settings (mod the bios) and set lower clock and lower voltage for 2D.

Lawrence Lee
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Post by Lawrence Lee » Fri Sep 02, 2005 1:45 pm

The 9600XT's nVidia equivalent is the FX5700 ULTRA.

VERiON
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Post by VERiON » Sat Sep 03, 2005 3:33 am

thanks

scara
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Post by scara » Sat Sep 03, 2005 6:07 am

VERiON wrote:6800 has also separate clock and voltage settings for 2D i 3D. Mayby i can edit this settings (mod the bios) and set lower clock and lower voltage for 2D.
I thought all graphics cards supported this, you don't need to mod the bios either (which would void the warranty). You can get programs for Linux that allow you to change the clock settings and I'm sure they support 2D/3D mode detection.

Here's the first one Google threw up: nVclock

VERiON
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Post by VERiON » Sat Sep 03, 2005 7:58 am

Yes, I know that. Thank for the link anyway, but I'm sorry to tell you that nVclock have some serious issues in linux.
www.phoronix.com wrote: (I can't give direct link because the site seems to be off-line)
"when we last tested the NVClock 0.8 CVS we still experienced several problems when paired up with some of our latest NVIDIA 6XXX and FX graphics cards"
in linux it's better to stick with native nVidia "cool bits for linux" which works flawlessly.

But refering to my post. I was thinking about bios mod not only to underclock (which can be also done by software) but also UNDERVOLT. Because undervolting can give you more power/temp drop than underclocking. With CPU - I'm using underclocking to achieve better undervolting. I would like to do this with GPU.

scara
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Post by scara » Mon Sep 05, 2005 2:32 am

Ah, sorry, I completely missed the undervolting :oops:

Seems that a 6800LE with bios mod might be your best option at the moment then. I haven't seen graphics power consumption figures for a long time though so I'm just basing that on what I remember and what you've said.

One alternative is to wait for some lower-spec 7xxx series cards to be released. With the current top 7800's being faster but less power-hungry than the 6800 equivalents, you would expect the 7800LE to foolow the same pattern. Its likely to be a long time before these come out though, and even then you can't guarantee that they will dissipate less heat.

Have you looked into mobile cards? I don't know how hard they are to find but I think the Linux support is fine.


btw my point about the 6600 was because of the lower nm process (110 vs 130). The 6600s use more power because of thier higher clocks (and presumably higher voltage to support those clocks), is that right? If so, could you mod the card to take the idle power consumption lower than the 6800s or 5700s?

=assassin=
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Post by =assassin= » Thu Sep 08, 2005 2:27 am

scara wrote: btw my point about the 6600 was because of the lower nm process (110 vs 130). The 6600s use more power because of thier higher clocks (and presumably higher voltage to support those clocks), is that right? If so, could you mod the card to take the idle power consumption lower than the 6800s or 5700s?
In terms of PCI-Express cards, the 6600GT (core@500Mhz) will use more power than a 6800 (according to reviews I've seen) but the vanilla 6600 (core@300Mhz) will not. In terms of AGP cards though, the 6600's have a bridge chip that generates a lot of heat and uses quite a bit of power, so even a vanilla 6600 would be quite power hungry.

Thomas
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Galaxy GeForce 6800 ?

Post by Thomas » Thu Sep 08, 2005 2:38 am

Maybe the Galaxy GeForce 6800 could be a solution?

It comes standard with a Arctic Cooler and according to the review I've seen at 3DGuru, the fan is temperature controlled, so it slows down, when idle. It should be easy to underclock (not undervolt). The word is, it's silent. I'm recieving mine tomorrow, so I can tell a little about the noise level in a few days...

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