Best card? Lets see here...
That XFX 6800 XT will require a recap sooner rather than later. I have two of these and have seen countless more on eBay, most of which had blown caps already. Only a few like yours that didn't have blown caps (suggesting yours might be a low-hours card, which is good, because the stock cooler on these cards is absolutely horrible.) I recapped both of mine (one only temporarily with less-shoddy caps) and changed the cooler on one. Despite being an XT (the slowest among the 6800 variants), it still uses quite a bit of power. My guesstimate is around 60 Watts. While it may not seem like a lot, the core on the 6800 isn't the best when it comes to getting rid of that heat, so the card still tends to run hot. Thus, it needs a much bigger cooler than the stock one. With the stock one, you can expect the average load temperatures to be in the 70-80C, which is way too hot and will end up killing the card. After all, these are early pre-"bumpgate" era cards and often exhibit the same failure modes consistent with the bumpgate era cards. So good cooling is a must to keep them working reliably. 60C should be their highest-running temperature, not the idle temp (my 2nd one ran at 57C idle with an open case and GPU fan maxed out!!) What's worse, the cooler on this card doesn't use standard mounting hole pattern, nor are there any additional holes for mounting a separate cooler for the bridge chip if you do somehow get a new GPU cooler.
So to sum it up RE the XFX 6800 XT: it's a pretty decent card (maybe the best of the bunch for older games, performance-wise), but it's terrible to cool and won't be a long-lasting solution... unless you go all-out like I did and mod the cooler on it to a whole new level. Post with recap and cooler mods can be found here:
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/troubleshooting … apping-and-mods
Next, the HD2600 and X1650: these are also pretty nice cards for an XP build, though not as good as the 6800 XT for older games. The 6800 XT has fast gDDR2 RAM and it's 256-bit, while the HD2600 and x1650 use 128-bit bus and slower DDR2 RAM. So in older games that may depend heavier on the memory bandwidth, the 6800 XT may end up winning by quite a bit. In regards too power usage and heat generation / cooling, though, both the HD2600 and x1650 will use less power and run cooler compared to the 6800 XT. That being said, the HD2600 and x1650 have a real weak spot in terms of reliability: the ATI Realto bridge chip on the back of the card that has no cooler/heatsink on it. These chips tend to run very hot and will die quicker-than-usual over time. I've seen plenty of these cards dead on eBay (and other AGP cards from the HD and x1000 series) particularly for this reason. In a Pentium 4 rig, heat will likely be the dominating theme of your build, so it's possible you may see a quick demise to both of these cards. That's not to say don't use them, though. But if you do, consider mounting a cooler on top of the Realto bridge chip - something about the size of the cooler of that Radeon 9550 heatsink should do nicely. Use thermal adhesive or thermal epoxy to make sure it stays in place and doesn't fall off and short something. Other than that, these are good and pretty solid cards, reliability-wise.
Last but not least, the Radeon 9550. This is weakest card from your bunch... but also the lowest-power card. I personally really do like the Radeon 9550/9600 cards for "daily use" retro builds, because they are low power, no noise (it's a passive card, though consider installing a fan into your case and pointing it towards the card to help it cool better for longer service life), and is fairly well-balanced for the performance of an average Pentium 4 CPU. In most older games, this video card would be a slight bottleneck for most Pentium 4 CPUs (2.4 GHz Northwood and above), but not by much.
So which one to pick?? That will depend on a number of things. But consider the following, not in any particular order:
- case cooling capability
- daily retro use vs. fastest build just for show and very occasional play (hint: the fan of the 6800 XT is very loud and annoying, so certainly not for daily use.)
- power supply with strong enough 12V rail (needed not only for the P4, but also for the 6800 XT.)
dominusprog wrote on 2024-09-04, 16:30:
Also, keep in mind that build quality of the XFX card is much higher than other cards.
Build quality of most older XFX cards (GeForce 6 to 8 series) is most certainly shit. They're usually filled with crap caps, have a shoddy inadequate cooler, and VRMs that tend to run hot (which makes it even worse for the crap caps.) Past the 9 series, the crap caps are no longer a problem. But the XFX cards almost always come with crappier-than-stock coolers. Not sure how that's possible, as most OEM/reference coolers are already more-than-marginal at best... but that's XFX cards for ya. That's not to say I have anything XFX as a company in general. I still have a lot of cards from them. But IMO, they are far from "high quality" cards. I will give them some credit, though, and say that at least they tend to stick to more traditional MOSFETs and board designs, so they are sometimes easier to troubleshoot with more complex problems. But that's about it.
