Replacing an AGP video card

johnwhelan

Well-known member
This arrived via PM, however because there are a number of variables I thought it might be sensible to put the answer in a public area.

"thoughts on a vidio card for my system.

Sorry though, I am limited to PCI/AGP x8, not PCI-E!!

I currently have a MX-400, 128Mb and it is not only a pain in the [rear]!!, but also the fan has packed in now.

The rest of my system is "reasonable":
A-Open MS4SGI-N MB
Ram 768mB
Processor 2.8Ghz P4"

First comment is my personal cpu is a 2.4 p4 and I get reasonable Trainz performance with 2gigs of memory and a reasonably fast video card, an ATI 80 XT PE. It's not balanced video card / cpu but it works.

Second comment is the MX-400 is an nVidia product so staying within nVidia might help on the driver side but on the other hand it's a very old nVidia product so old bits of driver might be a problem.

Third comment if the motherboard is a MX4SGI-N then it can take 2 gigs of memory, CT2KIT12864Z40B or around $130 US.

Fourth comment would be the best performing AGP card would be an HIS X1950Pro 256MB 256bit GDDR3 Dual Link DVI TV HDCP AGP Graphics Card from ebuyer.co.uk for £94.99

However this card would require some sort of driver cleaning software to remove old traces of the nVidia driver.

I find it hard to locate AGP nVidia cards on ebuyer.co.uk. Two memory slot motherboard suggests price was a factor when the components were put together. Aopen isn't a tier one motherboard manufacturer either both suggest a new power supply of say Antec 500 earthwatts around $100 US, wouldn't be out of line.

In the end you end up with something that benchmarks about 50 fps on the TC benchmark.

Alternatives would be bring up nVidia in ebuyer.co.uk then search within and drop in AGP, then make a price / performance trade off based on tomshardware.com video card reviews.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/10/01/the_best_gaming_graphics_cards_for_the_money/page6.html

The cheapest nVidia card will probably be OK on your power supply.

Perhaps others have some thoughts.

Cheerio John
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/126851
 
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The X1950 is a power hog. Minimum 500 watts (a good one, not a cheap one) with dual 12v rails. No sense getting the 256 meg version when there's a 512 meg version available, usually around $159 US after rebates.

On the NVidia side, a 7900 GS with 256 megs is probably about the best you're going to do, though I think they have a 7950 available with 512 megs, but I'm not sure if the price/performance equation pays off. Don't know how much the memory increase means in Trainz, but in other games (such as Oblivion) it's noticeable. And as this is likely the last AGP card they're going to buy, might as well make it as future-proof as possible.

Either way, a good 500 watt PS will be required. The systems should also be bumped to 2 GB ram. Don't know what socket is on that Mobo, so upgrading the processor may be iffy.
 
I've got the x1950 pro 512mb on my machine. the box says 450 watt or greater for the card, with xfire 550 watt. 38 amps on a 12 volt rail.
on top of that you have your system to run plus a little to spare so I've put a 700 watt PS in.
 
Thank you for that John, and thank you guys for your suggestions/alternatives. Yes it is my machine I wrote to John about, as the area of graphics seems to me a bit of a minefield, especially on a very limited budget these days, and I searched for hours for a non PCI-e card yesterday. :confused:

By the way, I already have a 500W PSU installed.

Chris
 
Thank you for that John, and thank you guys for your suggestions/alternatives. Yes it is my machine I wrote to John about, as the area of graphics seems to me a bit of a minefield, especially on a very limited budget these days, and I searched for hours for a non PCI-e card yesterday. :confused:

By the way, I already have a 500W PSU installed.

Chris

www.ebuyer.co.uk I've used them before without problems, go to the graphics cards nVidia then use search within these results and put in agp they have 22 different nVidia AGP cards and 26 ATI AGP cards.

Go to www.crucial.com and use their software to scan your system. The reason I suggest upping the memory is you need to squeeze as much as you can out of the cpu. Your cpu is probably a Northwood so the motherboard is probably limited to 3 Ghz P4 which are impossible to find and the risk of upsetting the current set up it's not really worth while changing from the 2.8Ghz.

From memory I think your system is capable of dual channel and with your 768 Mb of memory on two slots it won't dual channel, so if you have a 512 mb stick on one side at least match it and bring it to a gig that should put you in dual channel and up the performance.

After that my P4 2.4 with 2 gigs gets 38 fps on the TC benchmark which is quite reasonable with the 256 mb ATI 850 PE XT so look at the tomshardware performance ratings and you can get a reasonable idea of the sort of performance you'll get with different cards. The more video card memory you have the less work the cpu has to do feeding the video card, however the GPU is important as well.

Much depends on your budget and you may decide to put the money on the video card today and up the memory in the future.

Hope that helps even if I did mix pounds and dollars.

Cheerio John
 
A great help and thank you again John.

One question though - does the ATI Radeon X1950 Range have two versions of the same thing AGP & PCI-e??

And I was planning to upgrade the RAM, although probably to 1Gb (2 x 512k's) to balance it up. Aghhh - 2 questions - Dual channel??

Chris

Edit: I have just read up re Dual channel, so I replaced the 512k module with the old 256k one, and the machine has switched into Dual Channel mode (checked with CPU-Z). I'll keep it like that so I can test, but in theory it should improve things slightly. I am being lead to think that my main area for concern at the moment, is definitely the graphics card, especially after reading that "jdemm8" runs TC on 256k!! (in another thread)
 
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A great help and thank you again John.

One question though - does the ATI Radeon X1950 Range have two versions of the same thing AGP & PCI-e??

And I was planning to upgrade the RAM, although probably to 1Gb (2 x 512k's) to balance it up. Aghhh - 2 questions - Dual channel??

Chris

Edit: I have just read up re Dual channel, so I replaced the 512k module with the old 256k one, and the machine has switched into Dual Channel mode (checked with CPU-Z). I'll keep it like that so I can test, but in theory it should improve things slightly. I am being lead to think that my main area for concern at the moment, is definitely the graphics card, especially after reading that "jdemm8" runs TC on 256k!! (in another thread)

Yes there is a pci-e and an AGP version of the X1950 card.

XP likes to have 512 Mb for itself, things really do improve at one gig but 2 gigs is better, 512 mb dual channel or 768 mb non dual channel tricky, the trade off is roughly half the memory speed against using the disk more which is roughly 10,000 times slower, I'd probably go with the 768 mb memory. What speed does the memory you have in there scan at with crucial's scanner? How much would a second stick of 612 mb memory cost?

You will have driver problems going to the 1950 since it's ATI, I'd probably reinstall the operating system on a reformatted partition but their are other tools that can clean old bits of driver out which are a bit less drastic.

You can benchmark your machine in Trainz by the way to see the effects of different amount of memory. There is a benchmark for TC and one for TRS2006 and I'm sure we can come up with one for TRS2004 if needed.

Cheerio John
 
We spoke once before about the Benckmark John but my DVD drive wasn't working at the time. (although why I wanted it is anyone's guess)

Trainz is a "funny" product, in that the routes I would expect trouble on are not much trouble at all, and vice-versa. For example: Montana Rail Link (TPR), the only US route (now defunct) I now love, this is 200+ Miles long, (one-way journey 5½hrs!!) gives me very little problem at all, the Yorkshire routes, 2 linked sections, Darlington - Newcastle, no problem, but give me 5 miles in Angelah's Havant and it is nearly unplayable.

I will upgrade to a matched 1Gb in any event and also the ATI card, well Christmas is not far away, and at my age it will come twice as quickly!!

Chris
 
We spoke once before about the Benckmark John but my DVD drive wasn't working at the time. (although why I wanted it is anyone's guess)

Trainz is a "funny" product, in that the routes I would expect trouble on are not much trouble at all, and vice-versa. For example: Montana Rail Link (TPR), the only US route (now defunct) I now love, this is 200+ Miles long, (one-way journey 5½hrs!!) gives me very little problem at all, the Yorkshire routes, 2 linked sections, Darlington - Newcastle, no problem, but give me 5 miles in Angelah's Havant and it is nearly unplayable.

I will upgrade to a matched 1Gb in any event and also the ATI card, well Christmas is not far away, and at my age it will come twice as quickly!!

Chris

Well if you think about it the performance difference is understandable. Basically Trainz has to calculate where each polygon goes, it understands that two identical items only need to be calculated once and it really only calculates what is on the screen.

So US items mainly diesel locos so few curves, fairly low polys together with identical 50 foot box cars or even 86 foot boxcars again lowish polys mean there aren't that many polygons to work out.

UK layouts, 17 foot wagons so three times the number of bogeys, and more than likely polygons per 50 feet of train, probably steam locos with higher poly counts and more animation, then you get to scenery.

I once went to dine with some one. The instructions were hit the xyz road and its the first house past the bend. It was we drove ten miles to the bend, another mile or so to the first house past the bend. There really isn't that much scenery in the US compared with the UK. Scenery costs polys and textures or performance so I would expect a UK layout to run more slowly.

Angelah is sort of associated with Trainz carriage works, her view of life is she likes detail and she has a fairly fast machine so you can expect highly detailed layouts from her that require a fast machine.

The benchmark thing is important to try to steer people towards the most appropriate routes for their machines. Once you calibrate your machine by running one of the two known benchmarks then we can expect every layout that runs at half the benchmark speed on your machine to run more slowly than the benchmark on other people's machines, probably at half the speed. If it runs faster than the benchmark then it's appropriate for lower powered machines.

The beauty of the benchmarks are basically you run a session in Trainz from a .bat file so its repeatable, and because everything is measured as a ratio to the known benchmarks it is possible to place the layouts in a rough performance order.

Cheerio John
 
Unless you play just Trainz, an AGP card will be inadequate in about year and a half. Much smarter choice would be to buy a new main board to work with this processor or upgrade the computer all together so that it can use PCI-E cards.
 
Hello SandwichSpread, I have difficulty playing ALL of angelah's routes. Although they are fantastically created, beautifully sculptured landscapes, she must have a super-duper PC, cos I have difficulty running any trains whatsoever, even light engines!! I'm sure that they are only "playable" if you have a machine to match hers....

Cheerz. ex-railwayman.

P.S. Many thanks for your exhaustive synopsis John W, I have picked up a few snippets of very useful information from your posts.
 
Unless you play just Trainz, an AGP card will be inadequate in about year and a half. Much smarter choice would be to buy a new main board to work with this processor or upgrade the computer all together so that it can use PCI-E cards.

Why the bandwidth available on AGP 8x and PCI-e are both more than enough for any current video card. AGP is not a bottle neck for video cards.

Cheerio John
 
Both nVidia and Radeon have a section of their websites for archived drivers.
(I've had to search both!)

These go back some years, so there are older drivers available (though I use nVidia and the latest drivers still work on the older cards).

There's a utility "drive sweeper" (IIRC) which can help.

Colin
 
Going Dual Channel down to 512Mb was certainly not the direction to take, so I have now restored 784Mb single. I have however found an upgrade to 1Gb Dual at this site http://www.memoryc.com/AOPEN/MX4SG-N.html for £39.- Not bad.

I think I'll go for the ATI card suggested by John, although I did find several NVidia 7XXX series cards this morning, but this re-prompts my original msg to JW in that they all claim how good they are that the whole subject then becomes a bloody minefield, especially as I have seen on here how useless these 7XXX cards seem to have been to them.

Chris
 
Why the bandwidth available on AGP 8x and PCI-e are both more than enough for any current video card. AGP is not a bottle neck for video cards.

Cheerio John

Correct however production of AGP cards will be in decline - have you seen an 8800 GTX that is AGP made? Nope. If you want top of the line you will need PCI-E.
 
Correct however production of AGP cards will be in decline - have you seen an 8800 GTX that is AGP made? Nope. If you want top of the line you will need PCI-E.

But at the end of the day what we are talking about is getting a given rate of frames per second in Trainz, and for most people cost comes into the equation. If film is fine at 24 frames per second why should I spend more on the computer to be able to run the same session at 88 frames per second. My eyes can't tell any difference. My electricity bill might be able to tell the difference.

A 2.8 p4 cpu with a fast video card and 2 gigs of memory will give an adequate performance for many people and in this particular case given the cost of computers and parts in the UK upping the video card to the fastest available in AGP is the most cost effective solution to getting a reasonable level of performance that is within the users control.

If we could identify the load put on the computer by a particular item that would be extremely useful. Over time hopefully we can start to benchmark some routes, but to be honest the most cost effective way to increase performance is for content creators to use tools like lod, single texture files of the right size, and use textures rather than polys for modelling. If route builders had better tools / guidelines we might see an end to the sort of posts this route is incredibly slow followed by some one saying it runs fine on my machine, same hardware, after I replaced the track and a fencing spline.

Cheerio John
 
hey, i think i have a driver cleaner somewhere i used to erase to radeon drivers. i actually think its a utility radeon has, might check the nvidea website to see if something similar to it. also if its installed on your pc under add/remove programs, i got something to delete all those related files to that driver as well.
 
But at the end of the day what we are talking about is getting a given rate of frames per second in Trainz, and for most people cost comes into the equation. If film is fine at 24 frames per second why should I spend more on the computer to be able to run the same session at 88 frames per second. My eyes can't tell any difference.

Well, not exactly true. I used to support this argument too, until I did more research. The way a PC displays visuals is different from the way they are presented by film. Barring any motion blurring, more FPWS is generally better, as in more realistic.

Ed
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by johnwhelan
But at the end of the day what we are talking about is getting a given rate of frames per second in Trainz, and for most people cost comes into the equation. If film is fine at 24 frames per second why should I spend more on the computer to be able to run the same session at 88 frames per second. My eyes can't tell any difference.


Well, not exactly true. I used to support this argument too, until I did more research. The way a PC displays visuals is different from the way they are presented by film. Barring any motion blurring, more FPWS is generally better, as in more realistic.

Ed

Agreed but at a basic level there is a difference between a stuttering display and one with fluid movement. The differences above this are more subtle and come at a higher cost. In other words you are into cost benefit analysis and its more difficult to justify the cost for the difference in quality.

Cheerio John
 
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