MOBO/Video card question

My 6 year old laptop passed away recently (sniff, loved that computer) and I’m in the process of building a new desktop.

However, since it’s been quite a while since I’ve looked at video cards and whatnot I’ve got a question:

The NVIDIA 8800 and above video cards all use PCIE2.0 x16 slots, but most MOBOs with that feature are quite a bit more expensive.

Does anyone know of a reasonably priced (I’m talking less than 6-7k NT) MOBO by a brand like Asus or Gigabyte that has this feature?

IF not, does anyone know if it’s possible to use say, the new 9600 GT card (which is PCIE 2.0) on a board that’s only PCIE 1.0?

o_O

the 9 series are out now? I thought they were still just a rumour?

[quote=“x08”]o_O

the 9 series are out now? I thought they were still just a rumour?[/quote]

9600 GT models are fairly new, came out Feb. I think. I’ve read that the 9800 series will be out this summer.

PCIE 2.0 is backwards compatible with 1.0. So you can absolutely put a 9600GT into a mobo that only has PCIE 1.0. You should have no performance degradation because 1.0 still offers enough bandwidth not to choke a 9600gt.

Thanks for the information. There are still a few mobo’s I’m looking at, some are P35 and others X38, still can’t decide which one to get. For the most part I’m looking at sites like newegg just to see the reviews for the boards.

I’m out of touch with which exactly is the best mobo chip set at the moment. But generally the recent nVidia chip sets have been inferior to the Intel ones. Anandtech.com and HardOCP are good sites to check for reviews.

Only slightly relevant, but I bought an 8800gt a few months back because it was the only 8xxx they had at Nova here in Taichung … and I regret it. The card is fine until you put some strain on it, at which point it overheats and you crash hard. The automatic fan control doesn’t work, and even with the fan manually set way up, the card gets very hot. Lots of other people have had similar problems with it.

Its RAM is suspect too, according to the intarweb.

So … avoid that particular model. Others like the gtx are apparently fine.

What brand did you get? Maybe just shoddy brand build quality?

Did you try putting a heatsync on the 8800gt?

I don’t think it’s the brand – it’s Gigabyte if I remember rightly. And it comes with a pretty hefty heatsink/fan combo that wraps all the way over the card. The issue is that the fan doesn’t actually adjust to the heat of the card, I have to do it manually.

When games started crashing I did a bunch of internet searches and found out that basically everyone who has an 8800gt, of whatever brand, has the same problems.

Oh, and 8800gt driver support sucks too, especially on Linux. The only Detonator version that supports it is 169 beta. In the 169 release drivers they took 8800gt support out again!

It’s all a big mess.

So golfmade what mobo did you settle on? I might be building a rig in a few months when I get settled in more permenant like.

Well, it’s easy to check what’s available here. go to shopping.pchome.com.tw/?mod=area … =AGAB&BB=J for gra[jocs cards.
Right now I’d suggest a P35 board, as you won’t be spending too much money, however you can’t upgrade to a second Nvidia card if you’re set on Nvidia and want a motherboard with Intel chipset.
I’d suggest something like this shopping.pchome.com.tw/?mod=item … 3&ROWNO=26
The 9600GT is slower than the 8800GT and you can get 8800GT cards with decent cooling, so don’t listen to the guy moaning here.
The best deal on PC home for an 8800GT is this one shopping.pchome.com.tw/?mod=item … J&ROWNO=14 and it has the same cooler as the 8800GTX.
You might want to consider something like this shopping.pchome.com.tw/?mod=item … 2Q&ROWNO=1 as well, it’s a fair bit cheaper and offers almost as good performance as the 8800GT in most games.
It really depends what you’re after.

Sorry about getting back to you so late, here is the rig I ended up building (well ok I didn’t build it, but picked all the pieces I wanted and the store put it together for me):

Mobo: Asus P5k Pro
Processor: Intel 6750 stock speed
VGA: Asus 9600GT 512mb
RAM: Corsair 2GB 800mhz
HD: Seagate 500mb 32mb cache 7200.11
DVD: Sony DVD burner with lightcribe
Screen: Asus VW222U 22" widescreen
OS: Xp Pro 64 bit multi language version
Case: Coolermaster T05
Standard keyboard and a G7 mouse which I already had
PSU: At the moment I can’t recall, will fix this when I get home and can see the box.

All told was about 40,000NT. Was on a tight budget as our trip back home to the States last Xmas was expensive (but I did pay off my debt from university woot!).

Works like a dream. Granted, my last computer was a 6 year old laptop so that’s my perspective of moving up to this rig. Not interested in overclocking anything as it runs and loads things faster than I expected.

Have tried out various games, Oblivian, Half Life 2, etc, all run awesome at 1650x1200 (I don’t recall what the exact ratio is but whatever the 16x10 one is, sorry my math sucks). Oblivian with everything set at max and with HDR runs like a dream, I set some of the settings to high instead and the FPS went up quite a bit but didn’t look any worse for wear. Sorry at the moment I can’t give any specific FPS as I don’t really know how to.

LostSwede: I realize the 8800 is better than the 9600 but it was quite a bit more money than I could spend without sacrificing some other part.

Wasn’t interested in Vista and despite people warning me that 64bit XP sucks I’ve had ZERO problems with it. Every program and device I’ve tried to use it with works perfectly. Have had no driver issues and it loads damn fast from boot, haven’t actually timed it yet but will do so when I get home tonight from work.

Also bought the 64bit version because of the MUI ability. When I log onto my account everything is in English. When my wife logs onto her account it’s all in Chinese. Her English is fluent but she prefers to have things in Chinese, so that’s why we went with this OS.

Sadly because we live in an older building our ADSL speed isn’t very high, I’ve tried to download the 3dmark06 to test my system but it’s something like 500mb and would take forever to download. I’ll probably download it at a friends and burn onto a CD or something.

Have yet to burn a DVD or CD as 1) I’ve never burnt a DVD before and have no clue how to yet alone what kidn to buy, DVD-R, DVD+R, bah. 2) Have been spending most of my time oggling at the graphics in the games I’ve been playing to do much else when I have time to use the PC. :laughing:

I use some Asus program to monitor the temps, everything is stock speed and in the case I only have a 120mm and 85mm fan. The CPU is generally around 30C and the mobo about 40C. Is that normal? It doesn’t get too hot even after running a game like Oblivian. But then again it’s not summer yet.

Overall I love this system, especially because it runs perfect for everything I need and wasn’t too expensive, especially since it included such a big monitor and the OS.

I think that 9600 would be pretty good. I read the 8800 are great for gaming but expensive. Plus the 8800’s do not support the dedicated decoding of HD formats such as the new h.264 mpeg-4. So your processor would be crunching that. You can download torrents of videos encoded in that format to test.

How about fan on that 9600? Is it quiet or pretty noisy?

[quote=“circleback”]I think that 9600 would be pretty good. I read the 8800 are great for gaming but expensive. Plus the 8800’s do not support the dedicated decoding of HD formats such as the new h.264 mpeg-4. So your processor would be crunching that. You can download torrents of videos encoded in that format to test.

How about fan on that 9600? Is it quiet or pretty noisy?[/quote]

I would love to try out h.264 style videos but again our net is damn slow, would take forever to download such a large video.

I can’t hear the 9600 fan. Only thing I really hear is the PSU and the internal fans in the case itself. But by no means is it noisy, well to me at least.

There are a few websites out there where you can test h.264 encoded videos, but I don’t know them right offhand. When I was back in the US some of the major networks post tv shows in HD format! I was watching Lost in HD on my sister’s computer there. Too bad that you can’t get that content outside the USA! Grrr…

Thanks for the update on the fan noise of the video card. That is a major concern for me when looking to purchase a new GPU. Taiwan is so dusty you i tend to avoid fans on video cards in favor of the fanless heatsink models. But I have heard some companies have upgraded the quality of the fans. Also, I try to notice if the fans are replaceable as well.

Regarding Linux, I have read that the 9600 is not well supported yet. In addition, nvidia’s true video decoding is not yet supported with thier Linux drivers. Neither is ATI’s. It’s a shame if you want to build a sweet MythTV HTPC and want to take advantage of the decoding function on the GPU in order to get excellent HD video playback. Not to say that a fast processor can’t do that. But still, you buy the thing and still have to pay the “Mircrosoft tax” utilize it’s full capabilities.