Chaintech FX 5900 XT Vid Card Opinions please

Speakeasy forum. There is a guy named John Robie that is an avid gamer He's in SE all the time. Doesn't seem to show in the technical forums very much any more.

I'm certain that he'll be able to help you or steer you to help.

I just bought a Chaintech Ge Force MX 400, so I'm probably up to where you were three years ago. LOL

At least the force is with you. I am still with my steath3 s540 (talk about old!).

Hey Brandon, you got to stop doing these thing. You know what always happen when you tinker with your computer. LOL.

goto
www.tomshardware.com
go in there graphics/display section and look in VGA Charts III
The GeForce FX 5900XT is the GeForce FX 5900SE...they same thing, but they are actually the lowest 5900 Card, it goes like this

GeForce FX 5950 Ultra
^
^
GeForce FX 5900 Ultra
^
^
GeForce FX 5900
^
^
GeForce FX 5900XT/SE

The XT is a good card, not great but for $178 you should go for a $195 MSI RX9800 (Radeon 9800 128MB)
It's going to be faster and turn back better performance in AA/AF...otherwise the 5900XT/SE can keep up rather fine to the 9700Pro or 9800np (non-pro)
If you don't want AA/AF go for the 5900XT for $178
If you want AA/AF goto newegg and pick up the 9800Pro...IMO that would be best deal, if AA/AF isn't an issue with you than by all means go for the slightly less expensive and still very fast 5900XT...

Decided I didn't want to wait. The guy that owns the store told me he'd eat the card if Far Cry didn't play well. First the good news. Took 10 mins to install card, Nvidia drivers and OS picked up card right away. Fired up Far Cry, beautiful graphics.

Now the bad news. I had to of course pull all the cables out to get inside my tower. I've now lost the use of my usb hub, which also means I can't use any attached peripherals, including my wireless keyboard. The ps/2 KB works for everything EXCEPT the game! (You called it, Art).

I ran into this problem once before, and Ed O'Daniel suggested a fix for me, but I can't remember what the heck it is. Guess it's google time....Will let ya know how it goes....::sigh::::

It took 8 hrs. after installing the card to get any keyboard functionality back. Then another 5 hrs. the following day to get the vid card to not lock up. After alot of googling, I found a bunch of hits that said *not* to install drivers above 60.85...but I didn't have that and had to go to the Chaintech site in Taiwan to d/l that for my particular card- which took over 12 hrs. I didn't have the NVidia drivers cuz the disk cracked when I took it out of the case. I sent an email to Chaintech about which drivers I should get, and they said to go to the NVidia site and d/l the same drivers (ver. 61.77) that locked everything up on me. DUH! Well, everything looks good now, Far Cry looks absolutely fantastic compared to what I had with the ti4200 (still a good card, imo.) I probably would have gotten a card a notch or 2 better, but this was the best card I could buy locally. Oh, well- guess I'll do that on my next system, which could be before the end of the year. I want to see how the AMD socket 939 boards do, and may go the AMD 64 bit route. Strange that my ti4200 card accepted the 61.77 drivers, while I got the "unsigned driver" message on the new card.

Are you doing any video works with this computer? I was just wondering if this card help at all for that purpose (not that I can afford one..lol).

I have a TV tuner card for recording tv shows, and sometimes burn them to a RW disk and watch them at work, lol. I use the tuner card to capture analog vids I'm slowly archiving to DVD. I use the firewire port from the Audigy SoundBlaster bay to capture vids from my digital video camera. So the new card doesn't factor into my video capturing stuff.

The new card seems to be working well, but not at highest resolution settings, but I can live with that. Could be my system isn't fast enough to pump out the frame-rates I wanted? On a different note, I went back to the shop where I bought the card, and told the guy to "start eating" cuz he promised me the card would run great at highest settings, and if it didn't he said he'd eat the card. I was just busting his chops. We both agreed it's probably my system (I told him I wanted to buy a higher end card; he told me to stop wasting my $$, lol). To make up for my troubles, he gave me a brand new Motorola cable modem I almost bought at Circuit City yesterday for $60 after a rebate. My isp just upgraded broadband download speeds to 7MB/sec(!), so I don't have to rent a cable modem anymore. Good deal, huh. Do kinda wish in retrospect that I got a higher end card, but the guy probably did me a favor by not selling me one, lol.