Crucial radeon 7500 or 9100?

Crucial uk seem to be offering a good deal on their radeon cards with
free delivery, but cant make my mind 7500 £34 or 9100 £54.

I know 7500 is a directx7 card and 9100 is directx8.

I know that 9100 is an 8500 but read - not sure about this - it may be
"crippled" ie not perform as well and so not be worth it.

Apart from the normal stuff I do like to play the odd 3d game. Current
PC struggles with jedi outcast - did I hear someone s******. So it
would be nice to play that and the latest tomb raider and of course
half-life 2 and doom3 would be a blessed bonus. As you have gathered
funds are limited. So just how much better is the 9100 to the 7500?
Not seem a straight comparisson anywhere. So quality of picture and
framerate are we talking 10% or 50% or what? And what of the other
features, dvd playback, dvi...?

I have an old temperamental BX mobo that crucial say these cards
should work with. I've upgraded the memory and put in the max cpu it
can take ie PIII 600. So maybe a 7500 is adequate?

On 7 Oct 2003 17:34:16 -0700, (Zordiac) wrote:

Crucial uk seem to be offering a good deal on their radeon cards with
free delivery, but cant make my mind 7500 £34 or 9100 £54.

I know 7500 is a directx7 card and 9100 is directx8.

I know that 9100 is an 8500 but read - not sure about this - it may be
"crippled" ie not perform as well and so not be worth it.

Apart from the normal stuff I do like to play the odd 3d game. Current
PC struggles with jedi outcast - did I hear someone s******. So it
would be nice to play that and the latest tomb raider and of course
half-life 2 and doom3 would be a blessed bonus. As you have gathered
funds are limited. So just how much better is the 9100 to the 7500?
Not seem a straight comparisson anywhere. So quality of picture and
framerate are we talking 10% or 50% or what? And what of the other
features, dvd playback, dvi...?

I have an old temperamental BX mobo that crucial say these cards
should work with. I've upgraded the memory and put in the max cpu it
can take ie PIII 600. So maybe a 7500 is adequate?


To be honest, that system will crawl at best with the likes of
Doom3, and Half Life 2, even with a "beefer" videocard. My brother has
a PIII 700 on an old VIA Pro133 mainboard with a Radeon 9000. It did
have a GF2 MX before, and I see very little improvement in
framerates. Although the quality has improved because of the DX8
support.
The 9100 will be the better card, but you won't see it's true
power, because your system will bottleneck it. Even so, games like
Doom3, and Half Life 2 would still need a stronger card than a 9100 to
be played in high detail.
I have a GF3 Ti200, which is in the same league as the 9100,
and it can't run the X2 benchmark, or the AquaMark 3 benchmark demo
decently without having to drop detail settings to low. These
benchmarks are based on real game engines that use pixel, and vertex
shaders of newer cards, so I doubt my GF3 will be able to "hang" with
the newer games coming out. If you need more power for older games,
then I'd get the 9100, but it's not something to get for new games.

The 8500, 8500LE and 9100 are the same GPU
The 8500LE and 9100 just run a few MHz slower
The 9000 and 9200 are the slightly slimmed down version
of the 8500,8500LE, 9100 chip

I'm really happy with my Sapphire ATI 9100 128MB card.

"Zordiac" wrote in message
om...
Crucial uk seem to be offering a good deal on their radeon cards with
free delivery, but cant make my mind 7500 £34 or 9100 £54.

I know 7500 is a directx7 card and 9100 is directx8.

I know that 9100 is an 8500 but read - not sure about this - it may be
"crippled" ie not perform as well and so not be worth it.

Apart from the normal stuff I do like to play the odd 3d game. Current
PC struggles with jedi outcast - did I hear someone s******. So it
would be nice to play that and the latest tomb raider and of course
half-life 2 and doom3 would be a blessed bonus. As you have gathered
funds are limited. So just how much better is the 9100 to the 7500?
Not seem a straight comparisson anywhere. So quality of picture and
framerate are we talking 10% or 50% or what? And what of the other
features, dvd playback, dvi...?

I have an old temperamental BX mobo that crucial say these cards
should work with. I've upgraded the memory and put in the max cpu it
can take ie PIII 600. So maybe a 7500 is adequate?

I own both and buch prefer the 9100, although my 7500 only runs SDR memory

SNIP
"[NEO]Loki" wrote in message . ..
The 9100 will be the better card, but you won't see it's true
power, because your system will bottleneck it. Even so, games like
Doom3, and Half Life 2 would still need a stronger card than a 9100 to
be played in high detail.
SNIP/

I guess I was playing devils advocate with this bit as I realise the
PC is old but you never know. Interestingly I just had a look for min
Doom3 specs and found - insidemacgames.com - "information, straight
from id Software's John Carmack" :
-1GHz CPU
-256MB RAM
-GF1 or Radeon 7xxx series card
which is a bit of a suprize as in lowish specs.

I can always take the 7500/9100 graphics card to a new PC. But I would
be dissapointed to find that the 9100 only gives a marginal say "10%"
improvement in quality/framerates compared to a 7500. If the
improvement is dramatic as in "50%" then thats the one for me. But can
I see a direct review comparisson anywhere. No. And the separate card
reviews I have seen do not allow me to make a comparisson : the 3dmark
ratings always seem to have different tests run for each card etc.

Have you tried overclocking? The extra bus MHz can do alot to alleviate
bottlenecks with slower computers

lost wrote in message ...
Have you tried overclocking? The extra bus MHz can do alot to alleviate
bottlenecks with slower computers

Yes but can only overclock from 100 to 103! Anything higher - 112, 133
- and my PC is subject to lock ups

But my original question still remains unanswered :
how much better is the radeon 9100 over the 7500?

I've since gone over reviews and the difference in fps for games
ranges from almost the same to the 9100 giving twice the fps compared
with the 7500. (The increased margin appears when a faster pc was
used.)

Also seen a review that stated the 7500 is better than the 9100 for
quality video playback!

And to muddy the waters it seems the 9600 is falling in price and can
be had for not much more than the 9100. So we have 7500 £34, 9100 £54,
9600 £85. Plus I understand that there are new xt cards to come out
this month so more price drops?