The Crucial Radeon 9700pro is currently billed as one of the fastest video cards in wide release.

Crucial Radeon 9700pro
Most press of lately has proclaimed the $340 8x AGP 9700pro with 128Mb RAM to be the top performer of current consumer video cards, beating out the top contenders based on the GeForce Ti4600. Crucial was kind enough to provide their version of ATI’s design to me for some testing and reporting.

Now, while Dell’s tech support was worried that the card wouldn’t even run with the Dell’s weaker power supply (the 9700pro sucks up extra power needing a power connection directly from the power supply), I figured I’d risk a house fire and throw it in there. It did work, without any explosions and ran quite fine.

The 9700pro offers dual display like its older brother the 9000pro, so you’re winning there. But as far as 3D performance, it was again stifled by the older system it was serving. My benchmarks saw a slight 10% gain in some areas and no improvement in others, just like with the 9000pro.

So it stands to say that much older systems can only go so far, so a cheaper graphics card would be best for it, like the 9000pro. If 3D is your primary use of a PC, then you may need to upgrade the entire system, seeing as how a beefy graphics card can be bottlenecked by a slow host system.

The MSI Ti4600 is a dual screen card which performed impressively in 3D tests.

MSI Ti4600 8x
MSI uses Nvidia’s GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) for their video cards, the Ti4600 being the fastest of them currently out (the GeForce FX is due very soon, though). Seeing as the Dell system was built around a GeForce card originally, I figured I’d see better improvements with the MSI card than I did with the Radeon cards, and to my shock I was totally right.

The Ti4600 is a dual screen card boasting 128Mb of RAM and an 8x AGP bus interface. This 8x AGP allows for a large bandwidth of data to be transmitted to and from the card, though it is severely bottlenecked by the Dell’s 2x SGP motherboard. Its performance gains in my 3D tests were much more impressive.

Boasting about an overall 35-50% performance increase over the GeForce 256 card, it made quite a nice impression on me. Running about $320 on the Web, I wonder if a $225 Ti4200 (a slower GPU than the Ti4600) would net about the same results with a lower price tag.

And once the GeForce FX GPU hits the market and becomes the top dog of the Nvidia chips, all the older GeForce cards will take a step down in price and become more available on eBay venues, so keep your eyes peeled.

Dariush Derakhshani. Photo: Billy Z. Duke.

Conclusion
It’s all about the price to performance ratios in this game, and with an older system there is a glass ceiling to the improvement you’ll get. But an improvement is out there for sure. Adding enhancements to an older system will give it more life and new uses. Though in some cases it is prudent to replace the system entirely, you can definitely squeeze more life out of your system 'til at least all our 401(k)s start doing a little better. (G.W. Bush, I’m looking in your direction!)

Dariush Derakhshani is an early 31 and makes for an interesting Googlism. Nicely bald and slowly going insane, he has a fear of commitment and of having to cook. He has written a bunch of articles littered about the Web, wrote for Maya: Secrets of the Pros and Maya 4.5 Savvy, is writing his own Maya book due out this SIGGRAPH, and co-moderates the 3d Hardware List e-mail forum (www.reiss-studio.com/3dhardware to join). A senior animator at Sight Effects in Venice, California, he can be found at www.painfulurination.com or you can send him viruses at koosh3d@earthlink.net. He's got flat feet.