ok i have the oppurtunity to rid myself of the 9200 coz its overheating after about 1 hr of gaming in my well ventelated case; not a driver issue as ive tried all catalysts that support this card and my sys isnt overclocked

neways i have the chance to buy a 5900xt clocked at 390/700; ive read in the reviews that the architecture of the core is the same yet on the leadtek (and other) sites they say that this card can do 292million vertices per sec; the other 5900xt on the leadtek site with the nice cooling was clocked at 400/700 but it says it can do 332 million vertices per sec.

can 10mhz make that kind of difference or is this bios controlled?

The higher the batter, i think they modify the bios (O/C) and flash it. Even if you get the chip with 390Mhz, you can easily clock it to higher cloock speed, because the FX5900 is very clockable. Don't forget to check the memory spped and memory timing, winfast make a very good job in cooling their Graphic card. This might be the card for you.

In between, don't forget that newer card are comming out very soon, this will
pull down prices of all video card including the 9800pro and by that time you might get better card with better value.

Good luck.

Ive got a MSI 5900XT, I recommend it.

i had the winfast a350tdh...

it was a decent card but at that time i wanted the 9800pro, so i sold it

i later read up on the reviews and from my own nighmare with a 9200, meant to be had as a temporary card i am steering well clear of ati; ive sold the card i need and the places ive looked dont sell that one they sell the xt version without the awesome cooling that my card had.

the closest one i can find is the gainward; it comes overclocked which cant be bad as it has a 3 year warranty and i know the retailer so i wouldnt have problems. the only thing is its bloody ugly.....

i can get that for £105 so i think ill get it and use the rest of my winfasts money for a dvd burner

tho this isnt related at all... now that the dual layer dvd discs are coming out does that mean that the single layer dvd rs are going to be phased out soon? if so i may as well wait coz i need it for uni for at least 2 years as media drives arent ever on anyones upgrade list....

having login problems

neways i got the card which came clocked at 450/780; 10200 stock 3dmark 01 with a p4 2ghz. i wanted 2 push it further, so i overclocked using fuzzy logic for my msi 845ar mobo, so as to avoid the warm boot problem. i upped the fsb to 123mhz (the point at which the 1:4 divider comes in) i didnt add voltage as i have ocd b4 with the default voltage. i applied it and temp settings were ok. but when i loaded 3dmark 01 my comp rebooted. i tried again but this time it wouldnt post. i had to cold boot. does this mean my hardware may have been damaged?

if ya do not raise any voltage you can't damage anything by raising FSB if ya look at mobo/CPU
but you are able to damage AGP or PCI card if the PCI / AGP clock is not independed from FSB ... just do a CMOS clear set every clock back to default and ur system should run normal if now ... whooooo not good

everything seemed ok, but does that mean that the lifespan of the graphics card wil be shortened? as it comes overclocked surely itll be damaged if the agp bus is going too fast?

i cant afford this to die.... i have no money left...

the card is so nice; i wish i hadnt o/cd it now...

but the reason i did clock it ~123mhz is that the msi forums stated that the divider changes so that the buses are running at normal speed. is this true?

oh yeh, is there any truth to northwoods dying early as i want to take this sytstem for uni and as a student i wont have time or money to repair the things. if athlons are more reliable i will have to take my new gaming home system to uni, which isnt great as i wont work then!!!

OK step by step

1. there is a general rule:
for any 10K more temp the chips life is reduced to the half
on first this sounds much but if you look at hardwares true lifetime of about 1-2 years this is absolutely no problem
I would not care about this

2. ~123 this is wrong .....
if there are multiplicators then it is for example ...
100 MHZ FSB
PCI should be 33.3 - so divisor is 3 now if you clock FSB higher to 115 MHz e.g. it is 38.3 MHz this goes until 132 MHz FSB when there is the next divisor ... then up to 166 and up to 200 ........
now there are 3 possibilities ...
1. the PCI / AGP buses are locked and do not change with FSB
2. the card does have its own clock generator and its equal what FSB PCI bus does have
3. the card does or does not have any problem to be overclocked

you just got to try this one out ... the risk of loosing your hardware is really low


and last thing ... northwoods
lets go to basics ... within CPU are very small power lines for sure ..
power flows there this causes those lines to get .... nah i don't get the word .... they just loose the quality of a straight line ...
this happens most in hotspots within the CPU since the e- move very heavy there ...
now when you raise power this process speeds up
now it COULD happen that you CPU is OCed to the max and runs awesomly well and one day onyl one of the million power lines got totally destroyed in one of the hotspots means CPU fails ... its simply dead this could happen totally unespected ...
since this does happen more often on a northwood then on other CPUs this is called the SNDS
sudden northwood death syndrome ...
BUT ANY CPU could die this way even a not OCed one
so if ya friend does not raise voltage or just a very little bit nothing should happen this is just for extreme OC ...
the northwood is just very good overclockable thats why this happens most here sicne the CPU does not fail on another position before like other CPU ...

in general you can say if ya go very carefully with clock / voltage changes nothing can happen ... just test any more MHz a long time and as soon as you get a crash that has no logical reason you are to high ... dunno whats the max for Pentiums ... but for athlon XPs its ...
default 1.65 absolutely no problem <1.8 ... 1.8-1.9 getting critical ... 1.9 -2.0 freaky .... 2.0+ hell have at least a compressor cooling device

Mertsch it amazes me how you know more than google!! :hail: :hail:

After reading the ati antialising article i am wondering whether the nv35 chips have anything up their sleeves? there are 10 million more transisters than the 5800 so there should be surely something? i remember reading an article way back that said that the nv 35 chips had support for the next directx. if this is true is there any way to unlock the features?

also the thermal probe on my 5900xt is disabled; is there any way to get it back??

Prepare yourself a PCI Graphic card. Search for a 5950 bios, and use the nv bios editor to edit the speed of the GPU and the memory, you can also modify the bios information such as the manufacture then, flash it. Now you have the 5950 you should have the thermal probe enable.

you may try you card with soft-overclock first to check your card capability before you flash your card. This make your job easier.

Good Luck.