Incase anyone didn't see my last post in the ATI X850 price, they dropped the price to 119.00, while supplies last.

I couldn't resist ;D

I got it! No TAX :o And FREE shipping 8)


Total price to me, $119.00 ;)

Hehe, got ya beat- I used the 5% off code from over at the HARDOCP forum.

$113.05 shipped.

The last new AGP board I purchase I think then it will be the end of the road for my 2.8C P4

heheh congrats ladies!! hehe like the soldiers said to each other in teh army

heheh yeah that was a bit of funny stuff from my side, the R481 aka X850 Pro/XT/XT PE AGP versions are ATi's best AGP cards up to date, okay they don't have SM 3.0 @ HDR + FSAA mode like the X1600 XT AGP does, but they do make great use of a nice 256 Bit GDDR3 ram bus, like it's predecessor dit the R420 aka X800Pro /XT / XT PE [ X800 was an R430 ;)]

I had the X800 XT PE and yeps it was the second most powerfull ATi AGP card out there it out performed the X850 XT but the X850 XT PE just won bu a 5% margin, only the greatest advantage of that X800 XT PE is that it had a nice single slot cooler the X850 XT and XT PE had a double slot cooler like our X1800 and X1900's have today also the same idea and design.

the X850 Pro has a single SLot cooler afaik.

I just hope you guys got ViVo versions because they are the only X850 Pro's that are flashable to XT/ XT PE models, remember you MSU have ViVo on your board and the speeds capabillities to make the flash work, if your card has no ViVo forget it, it won't work.

wrote on 06.08.06 at 12:49:39:

I just hope you guys got ViVo versions because they are the only X850 Pro's that are flashable to XT/ XT PE models, remember you MSU have ViVo on your board and the speeds capabillities to make the flash work, if your card has no ViVo forget it, it won't work.

Nope, didn't want ViVo and no interest in flashing.

Fast enough for my needs as it is and the end of the road for my last AGP gaming platform.

ah okay, oh well if there is free performance I would of done it, still finding a way to unlock all 16 ppipes and 6 vertex units with that Leadtek 6800 AGP 128MB I have here hehe, I know that River Tuner is a way of do'n it but never could find my way through that.

Quote:

Features 256MB GDDR3 memory 12 parallel rendering pipelines AGP 8X support DirectX® 9.0 and OpenGL® 2.0 support 3Dc™ technology SmartShader™ HD technology SmoothVision™ HD technology VideoShader™ HD technology Hyper Z™ HD technology DVD video playback S-video and composite video input and output (VIVO) HDTV support

It says (VIVO)

I may not do heavy overclocking but I do plan to flash to at least open up the additional pipelines ;)

if you want true XT PE speeds on your ViVo based X850 Pro AGP cards, the core should run at 540Mhz and the ram at 1180 Mhz DDR and believe me that's alot faster than than the Pro speeds, and hay it's free speed as well so why not  ;D ;) 8)

the speeds of the X800XT PE AGP was Core/mem 520Mhz/1120 Mhz DDR

LOL gdonovan, 113.50? Nice price. Thought I'd post this as soon as I seen it. Went to order my girlfriends card since I had bought one at the 139 price and seen the 119 price. Figured I'd let you guys know since I didn't think their stock of cards would last very long at the price at all.

Happy upgrading!!   ;D

the links that I had posted for upgrading the bios can be found here, just to let you guys know.

http://www.falconfly-central.de/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl?board=offtopic;action=display;num=1153967224

wrote on 06.08.06 at 18:01:17:

if you want true XT PE speeds on your ViVo based X850 Pro AGP cards, the core should run at 540Mhz and the ram at 1180 Mhz DDR and believe me that's alot faster than than the Pro speeds, and hay it's free speed as well so why not  ;D ;) 8) the speeds of the X800XT PE AGP was Core/mem 520Mhz/1120 Mhz DDR

They say your performance may vary. I hope I get a good one and can take it all the way. But at this price, it would be hard to be disappointed.

I also read that I should get aftermarket cooling if I want to run it that fast.

wrote on 06.08.06 at 17:59:11:

It says (VIVO)

No big deal either way, I'm surprise that is not listed in the description header.

I'll have to try and do some vid captures with it.

well Gamma742 there's always the good ole Artic coolers right ;)

Just letting you guys know, I had to upgrade my PS for this card though. Went out and bought a 500 watt.

I'm all set there, I went overkill on that aspect.

well better have too much than too little ;)

http://www.3dfx.ch/gallery/d/15096-1/ati_new.jpg

Can you say twice as fast?

Doom3 38fps vs 18fps
FEAR 31fps vs 13fps (average fps)

My wife told me UPS left a delivery attempt notice at the door ::)

Makes me want to drive home this weekend (500 miles) :-/

She's going to hang around the house tomorrow and wait for it :D

Yep, girlfriends card came today. Now, I just have to get her to start using it like it should be, GAMES.   :P  A very big upgrade from her 9250 she had. Got her to play Nova Logics Joint Operations but I couldn't get it to play real smooth for her with that card and she loves driving the jeeps around while we shoot everything so I'm hoping that she'll get more into things. Be nice to have a girlfriend that games with you part of the weekend and then keeps you busy with other stuff the rest of the weekend.    :o    lol Ok, so I may be dreaming but still........

Gdonovan, is that the 9800 that your getting twice the speeds from? NICE. I went from the 9600 Pro to this card so it's a HUGE upgrade for me. With CoD2 there was an option to run the game under "DX7" mode in order for me to play it smooth at 1024x 768, the this card, the option isn't even there, just runs in DX 9 mode, I love it. Graphics are just sweet. Oh by the way, it was a memory stick that was causing all my issues, but I'll post that in the other post.

wrote on 10.08.06 at 06:17:51:

Gdonovan, is that the 9800 that your getting twice the speeds from?

Yes, a 9800 pro with 128mb.

It is still a fast card that served me very, very well.

One thing I was surprised about the X850 is it is a fairly quiet card.

A quick note about the fps- In the control panel I had AA on x6 and A filtering on 8x I think. (I'm playing Thief II at the moment)

I wanted an apples to apples test and made no changes between swapping cards. Doom3 res was at 1024, I think FEAR was at the same or 800 x 600.

heh when I compared my old ASUS X800 XT Platinum Edition with my new Sapphire X1900 XTX it kinda doubed the idea when I compared the 9700 Pro with the X800 XT PE :-X

the 9700 Pro was the predecessor of the famous 9800 Pro so I skipped the 9800 seres and waited till the X800XT PE AGP was ready for launch.

here the Hercules 9700 Pro compared to the massive X1900 XTX gosh these 2 compared in performance was rather like turing the world of PC graphics inside out :-X

ATi R300 Hercules 3D PROPHET 9700 Pro AGP 128MB DDR Limited Red Edition Rev.C 0243 [normal Herc's had blue PCB's]
http://www.3dfx.ch/gallery/d/7574-2/DSC00991.jpg

ATi R420 ASUS AX800 XT Platinum Edition AGP 256MB GDDR3 Rev.A 0436:
http://www.3dfx.ch/gallery/d/15136-1/ASUS+X800XT+PE+AGP.jpg

ATi R580 Sapphire ATi Radeon X1900 XTX PCI-E 512MB GDDR3 Rev.A 0552
http://www.3dfx.ch/gallery/d/12712-2/Sapphire+Ati+Radeon+X1900+XTX+PCI-E+512MB++Rev_A+0552.JPG

The R580 chip is a great piece of technology it runs Quake4 & HalfLife2 EP1 @ 1600 x 1200 x32 Ultra settings with FSAA x6 AF x16 without probs on Athlon64 X2 4400+ Toledo setup on the Philips Brilliance 109SP 19" CRT monitor.

This was pretty difficult for the X800 XT PE though, had to turn off FSAA and AF to get a nice fluid gameplay of around the 57 fps that was done on the Dual OpteronDP 244 + 1GB PC3200ECC Reg LL a few mounths ago but then using the same reso also on the Philips Brilliance 109SP 19" CRT monitor.

The X1900 XTX does about 3 times of that ;D okay on the X2 4400+ + 2GB PC3200 ofcourse it a much faster SMP setup at first, at second twice the amount of ram and at third faster chipset no ECC Reg. and new tech overall.

The X1900 XTX has 48 pixelshader Processors and 8 Vertex shader units while the X800 XT PE only had 16 pixelshader Processors and 6 Vertex shader units and a 256 Bit Memory controller while the X1900XTX has a nice 512Bit Ringbus Memory controller which also does a great job of do'n the crunching stuff.

to be honest the ATi R4.xx VPU's was a great improvement over the R3.cc VPU's only they lacked Shader Model3.0 which I did expect to be in them, but they had a great advantage when FSAA and AF was combined in the most Direct3D titles the R4.xx cards took the lead thier performance in OpenGL apps was alittle dissapointing the GeForce 6 series just were best at do'n that games like Doom3, Quake4 which was just around the corner and other OpenGL based stuff, but games like HalfLife2 rocked on the ATi cards that was Direct3D at it's best allrighty :)

that R420 aka X800XT PE AGP gave me many hours of fun gameplay at it's time of day, the Laptop has an ATi R420 8 pixelshader processors/4 vertexshader units 256Bit GDDR2, but it still does show me what the R4.xx was capable of, just toobad that the R4.xx series had no ShaderModel3.0, maybe it wasn't possible ofr one or other reason, dunno about that.

R420 = MR9800 - X800Pro/XT/XT PE AGP cards
R423 = MRX800/Pro/XT - X800Pro/XT/XT PE AGP cards PCI-E
Why the $23 PCI based is and the R420 AGP is that the AGP varriant was made first and was mounted with the AGP to PCI-E Railito bridge chip and also AGP PCI-E wasn't the main VGA type of it's time, though that did change when 480 came out aka X850 series.

R480 = X850Pro/XT/XT PE PCI-E cards
R481 = X800Pro/XT/XT PE AGP cards


Why R481 is AGP is because that the R480 the PCI-E version was made earlier the R481 had the Railito AGP to PCI-E bridge chip whch made the R481 an AGP varriant of the R480 ;)

Cards are no longer posted on the site. Good thing you guys got them when you did, I didn't think they were going to last long at that price. Went to show someone else about them and they're gone.

The wifeypooh called me at noon today (Thursday) my card was delivered ;D

;D

congrats with your new R481's everyone  ;D  8)

My 9800 is a AIW not a Pro I should see a better jump :)

http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/4016/atidb7.jpg

not unless the AIW part, it more like a downgrade from the AIW part heh.

from my ASUS X800XT PE AGP to Sapphire X1900 XTX PCI-E was a big jump as well  as from your 9800 AIW to X850 Pro qua speed hehe :) nice one Gamma742 ;)

I'm happy as hell with mine.  ;D  Now that I got the memory issue figured out, I'm playing all my games at max settings. hehehehe  I think ATI really messed up when they gave the X1600 only a 128 bit memory interface though. Look at it though, in less then two weeks, and granted I have no idea how many ATI sold, they sold a ton of X850's. Had ATI put the X1600 at a 256 memory bus instead, how much better would have that card been compared to the X850? I know the X800GTO out performs the X1600 because of this issue, would the X850 been the much better of a card then and would we have got those instead? With ATI having 40 odd pixel pipelines and what ever else they put into the thing for the X1900 series and having the X1600 suposed to be in the some what of the same catagory, why put this limitation on it? The X1600 card would be the ideal middle class card had they bumped this one thing up on it. I'm a huge ATI fan, but I really think they screwed up when the put that card out. I'm bringing my box over to a friends house next weekend. He bought a 512 meg X1600 Pro HIS IceQ AGP card right before the ATI sale hit the net so I'm going to see how much of a difference these two cards are (both of our system specs are about the same, I helped him build his).

http://shop.ati.com/product.asp?sku=2699206

For some reason it was moved off the clearence page.

If anyone is getting two unknown devices in device manager you need to download the ATI WDM Driver as well to make them go away.

https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206/0/www2.ati.com/drivers/wdm_62.html

https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206/0/www2.ati.com/drivers/6-2_xp-2k_wdm_30152.exe

It has no impact on 3D operation and is related to the VIVO functions.

Well, while using the Omega drivers, I am getting two devices that aren't installed, but where did you find them on the site? Both links that you sent have a https link, which for ATI isn't allowing us to get to that spot.

Drivers and software ->Windows 2000 (in my case) -> RADEON -> Catalyst 6.2 Windows 2000 - Driver Download.

Go down to the dial up packages and grab the "WDM Integrated Driver Only", it will take care of the non-installed driver problem.

Ah, sweet, thanks man.

Ok, out of the four cards I ordered either at the 120 range or the 140$ range (one for my brother, one for a friend, one for the girlfriend-none of them would be ocing them so grabbed the best one out of the four :P) I have one card that might run the x850XTPE bios, two that will run the x850XT bios for sure and one that won't OC at all. Core clock speeds are 500/500 for Pro, 520/540 for XT and 540/590 for XTPE versions. The one that might run the XTPE bios is clocked at 563/588 speed using stock coolers. I'm thinking that if I buy an additional cooler for this, it might just work. The other two should work fine for the XT bios since the core and memory clocks are 532/556 and 541/559. The other card can't go past 501/502. I still have to actually update the bios on the card yet, have to get a floppy drive that works, but was wondering on if you guys have tried OC'ing your cards yet or what you guys thought about using a third party cooler and what brand/model?

if you want better image quallity and better performance in games use Omega Catalyst 6.3 for Win2K/XP I have used them for a very long time, on my X800XT PE AGP and X1900 XTX under 2K as XP , the FSAA and AF image quallity improves quite a bit.

Ah here it is my friends :)
Omega 6.3

it's the best driver with this extra handy Control panel:
RadLinker 2.033 for Windows 98/ME/2000/XP

The Best Overclocker for ATi X8.xx series and older varriants:
RadClocker 2.030 (just the clock rate tab) for Windows 98/ME/2000/XP

These 3 things give your cards the best image quallity and speed in games with this driver setup. ;)

Just an update on my X850 AGP- Still going strong, just finished playing Quake4 with it and everything looked great.

cool, and are you gonna go for that X1950 Pro AGP also Gary?

No, I suspect this will be my last AGP board.

The platform is old (by todays standards) and there are faster CPU's... another year or two from this one at best.

wrote on 15.11.06 at 00:50:38:

No, I suspect this will be my last AGP board. The platform is old (by todays standards) and there are faster CPU's... another year or two from this one at best.

I've been thinking the same thing. I am also a proud and pleased user of AIW ATI x800XT with an old reliable Barton @2.3Ghz, and still it runs everything quite good. Maybe next year or so I'll go for the Core2Duo 6700 with some newer card, but this old system still lives.

There is only one thing that bothers me in new mainboards - the unavailability of old PCI slots. I would like to hold on to my Voodoo2 SLI, when I change to the newer system too  ;)

I'll be going for a X1950 Pro AGP sometime next year, as I'm still using an AthlonXP 3200+ as my main gaming rig... ;D

...notably though this will be my last AGP card! 8)