01-15-2006, 03:20 AM
HowGozit,Jan 14 2006, 09:47 PM Wrote:Having said that, Deebye made a good choice in the 9600 IMHO. Probably fairly equivalent to the 6600 and priced well. I still have the kids playing on an Athlon 1700+ with a Radeon 9000 - and it is only a little slow on some games (tad laggy on WoW, I'm told - but playable).
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Thanks for the feedback. The installation went smoothly. I uninstalled the old drivers, yanked the 9200SE, slid in the 9600XT, and powered it up. I installed the new drivers and rebooted. It literally took less than 5 minutes.
I tried a little Guild Wars and cranked all of the visual goodies as high as they would go (1024x768), and it looked great (how do you check FPS with Guild Wars?). The animations were very smooth, and the enemies didn't look like blocky masses of triangles.
All in all I'm pretty happy with it so far. I was a bit worried about how loud the fan might be. My old 9200SE had no fan. I can't even hear it.
As an unexpected bonus, the 9600XT even solved a niggling video complaint I used to have. With my 9200SE, there used to be a very faint light coloured line down the middle of my screen. It was mostly unnoticable unless my monitor was showing something dark, like a movie or something. I thought it was my monitor, but now that the 9600XT is installed, I now see that it was the 9200SE. Weird.
I kinda wish I had done some benchmark tests with my 9200SE installed just so I had some hard numbers to compare how much better this new card is.