r300-r500 or r600+

[oliver]

Hi all,

I'm thinking of building a new rig, that will also run some (wine-d) games. Nothing heavy and super modern and graphic intense.

My options are, either keep my old board and use an AGP r500 card, (X1950 Pro i belive) using the OSS r300 driver only. Or, get something new, with PCI-e and use a new budget-mainline graphics card, which be based on the r600+ chipsets.

The upside on a r300 based part is that the driver is pretty much done. The downside is of course, you can't use the catalist drivers.

I know r600 based parts are coming a long nicly now driver wise, and when it's not; the catalist driver still works. I still much prefer an all oss solution.

So what do you guys recommend?

[curaga]

Get a new pcie card. Like Q has pointed out many times, R500 and less can't do some things that wine can use, ie they'll run less games or with lower effects only.

Also, if the agp card dies, getting a replacement that lives for over a year will be hard.

[pingufunkybeat]

I'd go for r600+ too.

In terms of functionality, there is not that much missing from r600g, and the missing stuff is close to being done -- HyperZ, MLAA, 2d tiling, texture tiling, etc.

The powersaving is the same on all radeon cards, so a less power hungry r700 or r800 is better than a monster r500. And even with all the extra optimisation in r300g, the pure HW power of the later cards will pull them ahead.

I can't think of anything that r300g can run, that r600g can't right now.

[whizse]

Go for a PCI-E card either way, AGP support has been a source of troubles IIRC.

r600g with Wine is pretty good these days (with 7.11 or git) there's a few annoying GPU hangs with some games otherwise support seems to be about the same as with r300g.

[oliver]

Well I do have a HD 2600Pro in a drawer somewhere I think, which is a r600, but it seems r800 support is just as good so maybe I'll find a budget r800 card. Then

As for the agp bit; i'd probably replace the whole rig if the vid card would have died

Thanks for your thoughts though.

[oliver]

Found this one:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814129146

5750 based card, as you recommended; but not passive. I like though how it has 2 displayport (future) and 2 dvi (present) ports. Dunno why it's activly cooled though. Should be still green though

As for a mobo, i'll go for an asus 970 based chipset (Don't care for SLI and all that stuff, so 1x16 is plenty, and the board i'm eyeing has 2x8 or 1x16.)

For my htpc, I'll start a new thread to get some info, as it's E350 questions I have

[plonoma]

Try to buy a passive card from the 6000 series.

[oliver]

you reccon support on the 6000's is as good as the 5000's?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102950

SAPPHIRE Ultimate 100326UL Radeon HD 6670 1GB 128-bit GDDR5

I found a gigabyte with a passive 6750 but 20 more. Funny to re-find on newegg though

[Melcar]

If you?re buying then go for the new stuff. No point in getting something old, unless you?re building a secondary rig to toy around with.

[oliver]

true, but buying something that doesn't work is annying :S but; i got a passive hd6xxx series and so far so good using ubuntu 11.04 to test with. everything I tried (granted not much) works so far and the oss driver