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My Gfx card just died...

Your PS wil be fine, its a quality brand.

If you can get an 'HIS' 3850, its cooler will dump the heat from the card and some from your system out the back of the case. If you cant get that paticular card, make sure you have airflow within your case.

What case and cooling do you have at present?
 
darren.head said:
Your PS wil be fine, its a quality brand.

If you can get an 'HIS' 3850, its cooler will dump the heat from the card and some from your system out the back of the case. If you cant get that paticular card, make sure you have airflow within your case.

What case and cooling do you have at present?
Click to expand...

I have a Lian Li PC 0700 just with stock cooling iirc. Just a double fan at the front grate pulling air in, and a single fan pushing air out the back. Will this be enough ?

I'm guessing from your post the 3850 will generate significantly more heat than my old 6800 ?

I see OC sell the HIS 3850, looks like its using a double-slot to dump the air from the card ?

[edit] One last thought... The machine is quite quiet at the moment, would the HIS 3850 be any louder than my old 6800 ?


Thanks for the help.
 
Last edited:
That card will be fine. The chip may generate slightly more heat, not much though.

The cooler is more than capable of cooling it and as I said it should push some hot air out of the case aswell, just to give your case cooling a helping hand.

The 'HIS' fans are very quiet and the card also comes with a factory overclock, so it should be a little faster.

I used to have 6800le and a 6800GT and I upgraded to a HIS X1900XT with the same cooler, you wont be dissapointed!:D
 
darren.head said:
That card will be fine. The chip may generate slightly more heat, not much though.

The cooler is more than capable of cooling it and as I said it should push some hot air out of the case aswell, just to give your case cooling a helping hand.

The 'HIS' fans are very quiet and the card also comes with a factory overclock, so it should be a little faster.

I used to have 6800le and a 6800GT and I upgraded to a HIS X1900XT with the same cooler, you wont be dissapointed!:D
Click to expand...

Thanks again for the reply :)

I was pretty set on ordering the HIS 3850 today but then read this (rather lengthy) thread - http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1276019

It includes a lists of problems with the AGP version of the card..

The main one seeming to be that the normal Ati Catalyst drivers don't work with the AGP version of the 3850. You need to get drivers from the card manufacturers site (these don't seem to be updated that often), or install the 'hotfix' version of the drivers from Ati -
http://support.ati.com/ics/support/KBAnswer.asp?questionID=31625

Make me wonder how much longer Ati will produce these 'hotfix' versions of the Cat drivers.... cos otherwise they would just roll this 'version' into the main driver download ?

Apparently this is the same situation as the 2600 cards, they dont have 'normal' Ati driver support.


There is also some reports of 3850's BSODing, rebooting, etc... with some VIA chipsets (http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1276019&page=25 post #498). In fact, i have the exact same VIA chipset (K8T800 Pro) mentioned in that post.
They mention forcing the agp port to run 4x fixed the issue, but im guessing that would have performance implications ?


Does anyone have a similar setup ? Hard to know if I will see similar problems...


Thanks.
 
That doesn't sound good. VIA chipsets are well known for problems with AGP/PCIe. Bit risky if you ask me to go down that route.

You could try and find a 7600GT or a 6800GT second hand for not too much money, just to tied you over.

Having looked through overclockers sale items you could get:

Gigabyte G33 motherboard for £35,

2GB GeIL ULL 6400 DDR2 £30

Intel Core2Duo 2180 £46

HIS 3850 PCIe 256MB Graphics card £59:eek:

This comes to £170, more than you wanted to spend but brings you up to date and you'll have regular drivers and a system that will play newer games awell as the ones you play now. It would also give you 2GB of ram.

You could O/C the 2180 too. People have had them over 3GHZ without too much trouble:D
 
connectors

Does your PSU have the 8 pin, or 6 pin connectors (1 or 2 ?) for PCI-e cards, or an adapter that takes 2 molex plugs and converts to a 6/8 pin ?
 
OMG just buy the card already!

FWIW, I still run an AGP x1950pro in an old system downstairs as a backup rig (AMD 3800x2 oc to 2.4ghz, 2gb ram, Abit AV8 skt 939 mobo) and strangely the same PSU as you - that has a via chipset and I've never had any issues with drivers. Runs AoC fine on low settings on a 19" monitor.

Just buy the damn thing, the best purchases are always impulse buys :-)
 
upgrade

Whats your budget like? It may be worth getting a cheap mobo / RAM / e series cpu and a newer low end pci-e card. All this together will probably set you back 100-150 quid.
 
Ideal solution: Get a new s775 mobo, C2D cpu, DDR2 RAM and a PCI-E gfx card.
Cheapest solution: Get a secondhand AGP card such as x1950pro, 7800GS or similar.
Easiest solution: Buy a new card such as the HD3850 (£97) or 6800GS (£67).

The problem is that by buying an AGP card, you are paying well over the odds and are still left with old tech that is difficult/costly to upgrade in future. You end up throwing good money after bad (e.g. 1gig RAM will hamper your gaming performance) so it may be best just to use this as an excuse for a full upgrade.

Bear in mind that a complete system upgrade doesn't have to be expensive these days (see the post above, £170 will get you something much better than you have already, which you may be able to sell for a few quid too).
 
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