Anlushac11

My Geforce Ti 4200-128MB is dying after three years of daily use and 2 overheats from fans that died. The card still plays games just fine, just not with DX9 graphics quality.

I looked for a card that offered performance similar to my Ti-4200 for around $100 to fill in til after the Athlon 64 mobo's with PCI express comes out probably after 1st of the year. then the plan is AMD Athlon 64+ 3000 and 2 x FX 6600'S PCI-E in SLI mode.

So I bought a Connect 3D Radeon 9550-256MB 8X AGP card.

Here are my system specs:

Wavesonic CS-3107-S aluminum MATX case
ATG 320W Micro-ATX/SFE power supply
Asus A7N8X-VM/400 MATX Nforce2 mobo
AMD Athlon XP 2200 256kL2 and 266MHz system bus.
2 x 512MB DDR333 RAM sticks
onboard 3d sound
onboard 10/100 NIC
Connect 3D Radeon 9550-256MB 8X AGP
Lite-On DVD/CD-RW combo drive
WD ATA133 7200rpm 30GB HDD
Windows 2000 SP4

I used 3D Mark 2001SE build 220 and 3D Mark 2003 build 340 to test

the Ti-4200 tested as follows:

3D Mark 2001SE - 9310 (The card scored 10,700 when new)

3D Mark 2003: 1750

Radeon 9550 tested stock 250MHz core/ 400MHz memory

3D Mark 2001SE - 7750

3D Mark 2003 - 2130

Radeon 9550 overclocked 350MHz core/ 430MHz memory

3D Mark 2001SE - 8976

3D Mark 2003 - 2763

Its not as fast as I had hoped but not as slow as I feared. With a good aftermarket cooling susystem or water cooling I think I can boost the speed another 10%.

Yes a Radeon 9600XT would have been better but it was more money than I had available and I am om a very limited budget.

The really sad part is the Radeon 9550XT was released 4 days after I bought my card. The Radeon 9550XT uses a RV360 core instead of the RV350 core and is clocked at 400MHz core/ 500MHz memory

j-dogg

Those numbers are pretty respectable considering my 9000 64mb I used to have averaged like 1700, and that was a DX 8.1 / 250mhz GPU / 400mhz RAM card.

konai_konai666

Yes, those are pretty powerful numbers, considering this thing was a stripped-down 9600..

Anlushac11

I was checking my driver settings and realized all the settings were for highest quality so I reset for performance and ran again.

3D Mark 2001SE score was 9015. Oddly the 3D Mark 2003 score was unchanged.

I am also looking at this cooler. Since the 9550 is based on a 9600 I think this should fit just fine and it vents the hot air out of the case which I want.

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduc...186-114&depa=0

Im still pricing water cooling components. I want to water cool this just because I can.

konai_konai666

A VGA Silencer would do, but I doubt much of a worthwhile increase of performance..

SpikeShot

Ya thats correct about the performance gain...

-A 2.4 C can be overclocked a ton, but if it was crap to begin with, then OCing it all day would not do much.
-Another example, Ocing a 5200 card from Nvidia, there is almost no point even though you can raise the core and RAM almost 20% of stock!
-So its gona be kind of the same even OCed, you may only gain a few numbers better.

Also, if you can afford it, or find this card, an old 9500 Pro, thats a great card that we all loved to death. Good stock Performace, easy solf mod, and you got a 9700 Pro with massive Ocing abiltiy!

konai_konai666

Those 9500's can attain 14K in 2K1 with ease. Its too bad these evil manufacturers/ third-parties play the name-game with a bag of tricks..

SpikeShot

Quote: Originally Posted by konai_konai666 Those 9500's can attain 14K in 2K1 with ease. Its too bad these evil manufacturers/ third-parties play the name-game with a bag of tricks..

True that, and its not uncommon to see much higher 2k1 scores. Woot to one of the last great budget cards, its all ready a legend in my book.

WuKillaBee

didnt base my purchase descision on forum users opinions, i had got the card before joining here, from hearing on a review that it was better than the 9600, and my friend who uses a 9600 256 can run DOOM3 on full graphics very nicely with some OCing.

As much as i would like to have an x800 or a Geforce 6800 256 or something, i cant really afford it...
so for only £50 odd, im happy with this card.... if it works as im hoping.

All that i would like to know from here, is wether or not im going to notice a big differents in performance with the 9550 256mb, as opposed to the 9000 128mb craplump?

and will i be able to run Doom 3 on full graphics? or on high at least, with shadows on etc etc without bad FPS?

my 9000 128mb runs doom3 on medium detail, with shadows off, and i get ok FPS with occasional lagginess in multiple enemy points in the game... im just really hoping it will improve with the 9550, as its a new card, and has double the ram... so can any1 here confirm any of this for me???

valve

Hi, i have a Connect3d radeon 9550 with 256 mb of ram, i have seen from close the card, its shipped with 5 ns memory, ddr, 128 bits, and comes with the mem clock at 200, the limit. I have tried to overclock the memory like you, but i cannot with my card.. the card cant reach 203 mhz at memory without shows graphic glitches, at least with ATItool, so i took other way, i have invest some time trying with the advanced memory timings, and it hit an increment of around 300 3dmarks at 3dmark 2001se, when at stock it scores 8200/8300 (running over an athlonxp barton at 1,9 ghz, 512 of ram and a kt600 chipset) on default settings. When i try to get up the freq of the chip, it does't show so much better speed, no more than 200 3dmarks running at 300 mhz.. so i switched again to stock freqs and im using the softmod drivers, works fine with everything i play. There is a better driver? i havent tested the omega one.

Nastas

Hey, i baught a Gecube 9550GT a couple days ago and finally got it installed into the computer yesterday. The first thing i relised with the card is it has R96PRO/XT stamped on it, i figure this is due to the fact it is a stripped down 9600. However when i installed it picked it up as a 9600 series???? I was unsure about this card as i had not read anything about it online and was unsure of how it would go, however it was in my budget and was 128MB so i grabbed it. When i got home i benchmarked it with 3dmark 2001se

My system Specs are
p4 3Ghz HT enabled (800mhz FSB)
Dell mobo
512mb dell ddr400

My old setup (OEM mx440) only ever managed 4500 which i believe to be pretty low. I installed the video card and was happy to see my score was now 10097. I then downloaded the ATI Tray tools and gave it a go overclocking. I was supprised to find that the stock speed for this thing was 400/400. I then took to overclocking and reached 455/510 before it found artifacts. I then slowed it down to 445/490 as i prefere to be safe and its stinking hot at the moment. With this i managed a new score of 11923. I am quite pleased with this, especially for half the price of a 9600XT. However i would like to get it to register as a 9550 instead of a 9600.