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I believe that the card is a rebranded version (possibly manufactured specifically for DELL, as that's the model name that my receipt says) of the ATi X300 with 128 MB RAM, PCI-e, one DVI and one VGA ports. Dell calls it X100, but feel free to call it X300. The PC was purchased in March 2005, if that helps you further to locate which card it is exactly.

> shows some bias traces

There is no bias. It is SIMPLY my EXPERIENCE from my old ATi card to this new GeForce card. I have used no other card in the last 2 years in that PC.

>and want a comparison with X2400

You are in no position to demand anything. This site is not Tom's Hardware where they have 10,000 graphics cards laying around them and they can pick and choose for their articles. These cards were tested in my personal machine and I simply wrote about my impressions after doing that upgrade last Saturday. I found the multimedia performance to be an important upgrading, so I wrote about it.

I am pretty sure that ATi has other recent technologies that do similar things, but I am in no position to test them. Feel free to send me one of these newer cards, and I will make sure that I will update my article accordingly! Until then, what I have in my lab will have to do.

So, take it easy when you have your expectancy of a graphics card review UP THERE. This is not your casual 3D gaming review, but from the point of view of someone who upgraded to a new card and saw a significant multimedia performance increase in the *2D and video space*. There is nothing more, and nothing less into it.

Edited 2007-07-19 08:22

While I do not object to the points you raise (in poisition to demand, the rebrand and other all) I just wanted some clairification and tried to point that cards are just "uneven"...

Since the review is short, and the uneven comparison makes the review "smell" biased.

Yes, my language may sound a bit inflammatory (I'm not intended to do it) and I'm really sorry for that but unfortunately I'm not a gamer and I don't read "casual 3D gaming reviews" but slashdot, OSNews and such. I'm just a linux programmer who works with low-level stuff and love watching movies.

I just expected a clearer article, my bad.

I'm just a linux programmer

I'm confused how you can be a linux programmer and such an apparent fan of ATI.

(I) want a comparison with X2400 or above card to play in even fields. [/quote]

That card has [i]no Linux drivers period. X1900 and friends have drivers, but not open source like your 9600xt.

nVidia's drivers are closed source as well, but at least their performance is almost on par with their Windows drivers (unlike ATI's) and at least they actually have drivers for their newest cards.

The Linux drivers don't do a lot of H.264 decoding, so it's all pretty irrelevant to this article. I just find it weird when people have loyalty to a hardware company, and especially so when it's a Linux guy with loyalty to ATI. And before anyone wonders, I don't have "loyalty" to nVidia. The moment ATI puts out a faster card with lower energy usage and good Linux drivers I'll be buying ATI.

ok, I found some more info about the specific card sold with the specific DELL workstation. The card was rebranded but under the hood was just the "ATi X300 SE PCI Express 128 MB".

Edited 2007-07-19 08:18

Thanks Ronald, appreciated!

Just out of curiosity - given the Nvidia 8600 a go with *NIX? it would be interesting to see what/how it performs - especially with Solaris.

Regarding "Pure Video" I assume that is a Windows only feature - they haven't/won't make it available using OpenGL on supported *NIX platforms :-(

When you use a rebranded ford to race with a ferrari,
race looks biased to ferrari. It's that simple.

Actually, it's not unfair at all. You see, the article simply shows what happens when you upgrade an older PC. You see, it is NOT clear that if you upgrade a graphics card you will get so much better rendering times and video playback. Sure, you will get better 3D performance, but multimedia is NOT clear to everyone out there that it will be faster. And this is why I wrote the review: because I wanted to show to fellow videographers or even casual HD enthusiasts who don't use NLEs or apps that support GL, that they can clearly benefit from a newer card. I am pretty sure that a newer ATI card will perform equally well in the multimedia front: it's just that I have no way of testing it.

Hence, I find my article pretty clear as to what it was trying to achieve: a WAKE UP CALL to fellow media users. I know video semi-professionals who use an Intel card with their Adobe Premiere!!! I really hope that this article wakes them up because there is significant speeds up to be gained from a gaming card, even if your media app doesn't support Quadro GL or whatever other similar PRO card!

I am not sure how more clear this can be written as.

Edited 2007-07-19 10:47

Umm, yes I thought that too after writing the first comment, you are right. IMHO if you've written that more explicitly in your review, I could realise that earlier and just say. "Oh, yes! good point" and write nothing an move on".

You are far more experienced than me in writing articles (I'm writing a blog about my personal experiences about programming and computers in a blog) but I'll say that anyway. Sometimes implicitly written intentions cannot be understood and some unnecessary noise can be raised by readers (like me. I just missed the point of the article).

Going by your analogy, you're displaying a bias towards Ford. It's no different from the people who accuse ArsTechnica of having an "anti-Mac" bias - when, if anything, they simply have an "anti-bullshit" bias. A decided lack of context is demonstrated by the failure to realize that the same standards are applied to all their reviews - not simply those of Apple products.

Here's a rather telling question: would you have had the same objections if the comparison had *not* been made to an ATI card, but rather to an nVidia card of the same vintage?

Note the resolution. Is the stuff you're playing back on your 9600XT 1920x1080?

I can play 1280x720 smoothly with an FX5200, but 1920x1080 is 2.25x that resolution...

I disagree. I spent a week reading gaming reviews online, and I haven't heard a bad word about it. It is not a slow budget card. According to gaming reviews elsewhere, it is middle-to-high-end.

For my own needs, as a videographer, it does the job perfectly. And that's why I wrote about it.

You should have read Anandtech, then. They don't exactly come out and say it's horrible, but they do say it was disappointing and they expected more. At least on the gaming side - the multimedia performance is quite good. Calling it one of the best is a little misleading IMHO, unless you specifically state that you're talking about multimedia capabilities and not gaming. Anyway, you're clearly enjoying it and that's what really matters I suppose.

The bottom line is that the 8600 really doesn't offer what we would expect from a next generation midrange part. While on its own the 8600 series is not bad hardware, NVIDIA needs to rely on more than its feature set to sell its product. This is especially true when DX10 games are not abundant and fairly few people are even running an operating system which supports DX10.

The GeForce 6600 GT outperformed the Radeon 9800 Pro in virtually every benchmark, sometimes by large margins. It managed this with prices that were at the time quite a bit lower than the previous generation's champ. GeForce 7600 GT was also typically faster than GeForce 6800 GT/GS, and it once again came with a lower price tag. The 8600 hardware on the other hand doesn't appear significantly faster or cheaper than the cards it's replacing..

Even if we can't expect new hardware at a particular price point to blow away the competition, we would at least like to see a consistently better performance than similarly priced previous generation hardware. Our follow up benchmarks confirm that we simply don't get this from the 8600 series. For users who want the highest performance for their money, the 8600 series is not the answer. If you can live without full H.264 decoding support and you still want DirectX 10, the 8800 GTS 320 is currently so much faster than the 8600 GTS that we would recommend spending the extra ~$75.


Edited 2007-07-19 15:18

"You should have read Anandtech then"

What gives you the right to make such demands? She merely wanted to write an article about HER experience with the card! That's all! She wasn't doing a card roundup, wasn't comparing it to anything besides her previous card....

Why so many of you are having issues with this article baffles me!

Eugenia checked out several other sources and nobody had any issues...while you might consider Anandtech a great source, maybe she does not...Or maybe checking EVERY site isn't possible?

Eugenia, thank you for taking the time to write this article. I'm also getting very into video editing, and I've been looking for a card much like this one...Especially at under $200! I found your review to be extremely personal and approachable...Keep 'em coming!

I think you took my comment the wrong way. I didn't think the article was bad at all - maybe not very useful, but I don't have any problems with it. I was simply saying that calling that card "one of the best" isn't really the general consensus out on the web, and pointed to one of the most highly respected hardware reviewers as an example. I'm actually not sure which sites Eugenia did go to that would have called it that, because AFAIK there isn't much disagreement about it.

I think a lot of the people complaining about the article were simply expecting this to be a hardware review, which it is not. It's more of a discussion about one person's experience with it than an exhaustive review, which the title should have given away.

Edited 2007-07-20 04:50

I have to agree with you. I was puzzled at the comment of it being one of the best. I don't see any compelling reason to put it into that category.

Wording... if it would say one of the best in price/performance for this particular purpose, or just best for this purpose, or not even using "best" since it's really not compared to anything but saying good/nice/well performing for this purpose for such a price, well, then I don't think anyone would've commented anything. But.

[quote]presenting the 8600GTS as "one of the best video cards on the market today" is just odd. It's a budget card, and not a highly recommended one. It's for example not mentioned on Tom's Hardware "Best Gaming Cards for the Money[/quote]

Eugenia was reviewing its multimedia playback capabilities. The 8800(gts/gtx/ultra) doesn't have H.264 decoding support, making the 8600gts just about nVidia's best card with that playback capability she was reviewing (you'll note her comment "gaming aside, etc").

Tom's doesn't have any 8600 GTS in their VGA charts. There's nothing to back up their claim as to what is good for the money. They spent time coming up with a list, but not showing how or why the list is worth anything.

Digit-life's digests are for more useful, and with less text to boot. But, they don't spoon-feed a list of, "if your wallet is this thick, buy this card." Unfortunately for Tom's guys, non-gaming features and other concerns (like noise--I can get nothing faster than a 8600GTS that's silent) often matter, in which case game FPS is still important, but not everything.

But, yeah, this is why OSNews shouldn't try to be a PC hardware upgrade site .

OSNews is a generic tech site and always has been, and so it fits fine. We always had, have, and will continue to have hardware items explored here. In fact, the device was tested from a software point of view in terms of video/NLE/rendering performance rather than taking apart its hardware side and 3D gaming (which I personally have little interest at, plus it's an aspect that was addresed by other gaming articles in the past hundreds of times).

That's all fine and dandy, sure.

But seriously, I'm more interested in finding out how specific hardware works with OTHER OS's, not just windows. If you really want to provide value to the readership of -this- site, I think you'll find that's the way to approach a hardware review.

This article felt like a paid advertisement from Nvidia that gives a thumbs up endorsement of their Windows drivers. Does it work with BeOS? Haiku? SkyOS? Syllable? How are the Linux Drivers? Can I put it in a pegasos?

These are the questions _I_ would expect to see answered in a Hardware review on OSNews. Maybe I'm a little bit out there, but it seems like that would make a lot more sense than, "I'm so l33t. I got a new gFx card and it's uber sleek in Windoze. Pr0n plays so much smoother!"

The fan can be heard a bit only when the PC turns on. After the USB and other drivers of Windows have loaded, the fan turns off, and you never hear of it again. At least not with video playback/rendering! Not sure about heavy gaming.

Thanks for the info, Eugenia -- I appreciate it! Good article, too

We got the card for usage with Windows. OSNews is not an "alternative OS site". It is a tech site with a given "alt OS" side. Sometimes we test things with other OSes, sometimes we don't. Besides, the point of the article is PureVideo HD, and so this is only available in Windows.

Did I say not to test with windows?

Did I say I had no interest in windows?

Do you care that I posted my comments from within windows?

Do you think I'm a total idiot? Wait, please don't answer that.

It's all fine and good that you got the hardware, that you tested it under windows, and that it worked great for you. Awesome. I'm thrilled for you, really I am.

I'm just trying to point out, that I think a _great_ way to add value to your reviews would be to subject the hardware to some unorthodox testing with _OTHER_ operating systems! In fact, that would probably be the most valuable parts of the reviews!

If I read a review on a product, generally the outcomes
boil down to a nice matrix with options of:

Worked Great, Worked OK, Sucked

crossed with

Price too High, Price Just right, OMG This is a steal

I'm just saying that I think it'd be really, really nice to put more of an OS slant on it, and add a lot of value for the readership if you added into matrix another dimension describing OS compatibility.

I don't know how much more clear this can be: Only Windows can be benefited by PureVideo HD, because there are no such drivers for any other OS. And so, it would be a WASTE of my time to report on that 3% of better speed on Linux (in any).

Besides, I have no plans installing Linux or Solaris or FreeBSD on that specific PC, because this is my main workstation PC and I don't mess up with it. Proof that the first upgrade only happened 2.5 years after I bought it. I have other PCs to mess up with and do tests and reviews and install alternative OSes, but none of these other PCs have PCI-express slots.

So you’re saying, it’s not worth buying?

If you are under an alternative OS only, it will make little difference if you are only interested in multimedia and NOT on gaming, yes. But if you are under Windows and you use an older card for your day to day operations and multimedia, you better damn upgrading right now! Even the 8400GS which costs only $63 will be better than an Intel or old nvidia/ati cards.

I'm just saying that I think it'd be really, really nice to put more of an OS slant on it, and add a lot of value for the readership if you added into matrix another dimension describing OS compatibility.

Bryanv, enough already. You made your wish, we explained why it is impossible for us to adhere to your wish, yet you continue to wish for something we already explained to you a hundred times we cannot bring.

Like I said, I'd be more than willing to test this card using alternative operating systems. Will you provide me with the card, and will you pay for the time I would spend on doing that test? We are not a big hardware website with full-time employees, bryanv. We are a voluntary effort, we do this in our free time, without getting paid. The time we spend on OSNews, is time we cannot spend managing our real lives.

And that time ain't cheap.

No, they need to fix the Linux driver. Or if you think that you can fart a better open-source driver in the next 6 months, hey, I'll take that too. I'm not picky.

Edited 2007-07-19 17:09

Does any of the PureVideo stuff work on Linux/Solaris/BSD?

Even without the HDCP encrypted hi-def output, the accelerated decoding and IDCT would be useful for set top boxes and so on. I googled but all I could find were unanswered questions...

Edited 2007-07-19 17:41

Short answer - no, and it doesn't look like they have any interest in sharing the specs needed to make it happen.

MPEG1/2 HW-Decoding works on nVidia hardware using XvMC, but the more advanced codecs which really need it aren't supported.

I don't believe ATI cards support any acceleration at all in Linux.

VIA Technologies company does support hardware acceleration for more than just MPEG-2 for their S3G UniChrome UniChrome Pro graphics chipsets, they support decoding of motion compensation (mo comp), Inverse Discrete Cosine Transform (iDCT), and Variable-Length Decoding (VLD) for MPEG-2, MPEG-4 ASP (H.263), and MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) video.

I don't believe ATI cards support any acceleration at all in Linux.

Not sure about Linux but under PC-BSD/FreeBSD 6.2 I can watch fullscreen with my Ati Radeon X600 HD format 1280x740 h264 compressed video without slowdown, only problem is sound a bit lagging- maybe some codec problem (6 channels anyway).

So, no need to spread FUD about "bad" opensource drivers.