Radeon 9800 Pro, our logical dream back in the day. Gefore FX 5900, 5900 Ultra, 5900XT had almost identical performance. Basically nV$d$a was scamming the rich, a well deserved one.
Depends if you cared about fog table / paletted textures. Radeon 9000 up has ugly fog table support, and that with specific drivers and specific settings, under Win98. No paletted textures. Geforce FX* had full support for both
My brother bought a 9800 Pro when it was new from his McDonald's job. I would drool over his PC every night. Half-Life 2 was an absolute fever dream. What a special time.
The first PC I built was an Athlon 64 2800+ with a gigabyte fx 5900xt. The CPU came with a copy of Far Cry, and the first time you came out of that cave and saw the beach it was amazing. I remember playing all of these games a ton back then. Thanks for the nostalgia trip.
The 9800 pro was the first flagship I card I owned apart from the original 3dfx orchid righteous 3D. I believe I owned an athlon 2500. It was really good. Main memory was playing grand theft auto vice city to death. Great memories!
the 9800 pro was not top of the line released the same day even. That'd be the XT. Also the 5900xt can't be used with unmodified graphics drivers in a head to head. It specifically substitutes code and degrades image quality because of unsupported features :) It's why your results for somethign like F.E.A.R. were wildly at odds with other games. Minimum doesn't use the features missing, but everything else does.
I was there. The 9800 PRO was THE card to get. Loads of power at a good price. And then ATI release the X800 series which was still a pretty solid competitor.
Don't know if this is the right place to ask this, but I need some help. I have a dope 2004 computer case and I'm wanting to go retro and put two gtx 280's in it. I'm building it from scratch and I'm having trouble finding an sli compatible motherboard that'll run both of them well, (that's also around 2008) Any advice?
If it's something related to what we do, it's always the right place :) We are working on something quite similar at the moment. So we're pretty deep in this topic. Easy advice is to go for the best of the best for chipsets, as you want performance that will not limit 280s. If you're going with intel, something with Intel X58 or nForce 790i chipsets. We went with X58 (Rampage II Extreme). For AMD I would recommend nForce 780a. Theoretically you can also go with lower tier chipset or older platform, but there you risk compatibility problems. As for finding the physical board, it's going to take some time and patience. Check your local market or for some good ebay deals regularly, and soon you're going to strike gold :)
@@attictiertech Thanks for the reply! I'll keep a look out online for one of those while I research more. Also, could I get away with 2x 80mm fans? It's all my case can hold and I can't find too much info on that either.
That would be insufficient. As you might need extra airflow. 280s in SLI are pretty damn close to each other, and even though they have blower-style coolers, one is choking the other. We pointed a 140mm fan to them on an open test bench to make sure they were cool enough. Perhaps you can make it work with the motherboard that has even more space between the PCI-E slots, or put the second card in the x8 slot, as it's further down.
@@attictiertech In that case I might see if I can fit a bigger fan of two, spread the cards out, or downgrade to a pair of Radeon 3870 x2's. Maybe all of the above. Thanks for the help! I should have it from here
You put space between the slots when you put RAM in dual channel, but this is still a single channel motherboard. It's not important how you apply of thermal paste if you manage to cover the whole IHS, which we did. Everything else is a matter of preference :)
