PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

Hi all,

It's new computer time in the McNeill household, and my current thoughts are:

Intel d865PERL mobo with intel 3gb processor (hard to find northwood these days so probably a prescott - in fact, it seems really hard to find the MOBO either ... any suggestions ?)

2 x 512 Kingston DDR 400mhz ram

My two old hard drives (1 x 40gb Caviar, 1 x 80gb Barracuda IV)

and of course my LUNA and POWERSAMPLER cards.

The question now (assuming all that is alright) is what graphics card to get ?

People here seem to like matrox. While dual screen isn't important to me, I don't mind having the option (there's a shop selling second hand 17" LGs for £30 down the road)

But the two 'big' matrox cards (128mb / 256mb DDR ram cards e.g. parhelia) both have active cooling - i.e. fans i.e. noise and this is meant to be a v. silent computer.

And the smaller cards have only 32mb or 64mb DDR memory, which seems a little on the low side (is it ?)

Anyway, anyone willing to comment on their matrox cards, any ideas about how they would work with the proposed system, any other suggestions for graphics cards ?

Any help appreciated ...

Will.

If you are not a 3d-gamer, the Matrox P650 is a good and noisefree choice!

Best,
Abdre

Thanks for the response.

Basically if I start playing any 3d games I sit there for 10 days and go mad, so ...

the angel to my right says that I should positively TRY and get a card that doesn't do gaming !

But the devil to my left says that it would be nice to have the option.

The main things are that it can handle all the basic stuff: watching DVDs, not taking up too much of my southbridge chipset (if that's the right one...), good handling of the sfp environment etc.

Would I not be able to play games at all with this card (say, Rainbow six 3 ?) boo-hoo !

Will.

[EDIT] - just been looking at radeon's and they appear to have fanless 128mb cards, so a little annoyed with matrox and toying with these ... dangerous territory ?

_________________

mr swim's home

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: mr swim on 2004-09-28 11:53 ]</font>

I've got an NVIDIA GeForce 64MB lump of some description sitting in my PC at the moment - its fanless (BIG heatsink!) and works very nicely.

Prior to that, I think I had a 3dfx VooDoo 2000 card - again, no problems.

The GeForce plays games very well (on those occasions when I feel like beating up some bots in UT)

Royston

I bought a Radeon 9600 without active cooling, and it increased my sfp-graphic performance to something quite acceptable. And it does gaming too It also has the option for two screens.
One note though is that it sometimes forget my screen's refresh-rate, something I havn't looked deep into solving though, since it's not that big of a problem.

Cheers!
Thomas

I got my 3.0GHz Northwood at NewEgg. It looks like ZipZoomFly still has them also:

http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDe ... Code=80661

Super nice in terms of temperature/thermal performance. 91degF idle.

i have a dual head nvidia card(from evga). it is a gforce 4 mx440 64mb, it cost $50 and it works perfectly.

*edit* i also got a 3ghz northwood from zip zoom fly.....

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: garyb on 2004-09-28 15:32 ]</font>

cheers people, will look into these suggestions ...

In terms of the northwood, does it matter that they have only a 512k cache as opposed to the prescott's 1mb ?

[EDIT] - both your northwood shops are in the states, and I am in the UK ... they are proving annoyingly hard to trace over here ...

[another EDIT] novatech sell them: http://www.novatech.co.uk

better: http://www.ebuyer.co.uk (although they don't call it a northwood, their 512k cached P4 3.0 ghz is in fact northwood.)


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: mr swim on 2004-10-01 10:13 ]</font>


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: mr swim on 2004-10-07 10:30 ]</font>

no. the chip with the smaller cache seems to work better....

On 2004-09-28 16:01, garyb wrote:
no. the chip with the smaller cache seems to work better....

It depends much on task it expected to perform: to run a few apps (>2) [simultaniosly](sorry, cant spell:), haven't wrote in english for so long...)
At low level pages in RAM are mapped to somewhere in cache, and while working with cached page it works like you have a "Super DDR RAM" 3000Mhz clock, so a bigger cache will perform better, because more memory will be cached.
But when working with sound hdd-subsystem speed is more noticeable - espessially access-time
Some conclusion : for pulsar-users cpu is only a piece of silicon which should be placed in some socket on something in which or Majesty Scope Project|Professional is plugged.
But for using a lot of virtual (aka VST etc) instruments/effects CPU is more important, and features such as HT and bigger cache take they turn.
In near future (dont know when exactly) i'm going to upgrade my DAW (Pulsar2+p4_1800+512RIMM+other) to something more rapid, if i have time - i'll try to make a review about HT - "is theory applicable to practice"

Going back to the graphics card: Someone gave me Combat Flight Simulator 3 for Xmas and my Matrox G550 wouldn't handle it. So I bought a Rad 9200 SE....Good for the game but the old Matrox was much better for audio programs, faster and more stable. The dual screen performance was also a lot better.

ATI is not known for driver stability.

Their hardware has come a long way performance-wise in the last year or so (since nVidia had the misfortune of dealing with moving to a smaller process with the manufacturing company that does the majority of BOTH companies' chip production, TSMC.)

Nvidia's early multiple desktop stuff seemed to be buggy as well, but recent driver versions have improved it a lot across the geforce range. Recommend for ati or nvidia dual monitors you check the pci latency of both outputs (typically output 1 will be astronomically high, above 230, while output 2 will often be 32 or less).

http://www.3dlabs.com

Wildcat VP series are very stable and support both DirectX and OpenGL.

interesting !

I hadn't come across these before, and will definitely check them out ...