Knowing the Graphic Card's Temperature

[wyz135]

Is there any software for me to know my graphic card? I wanted to over-clock because my memory clock is bull shit and I am afraid my graphic card's temperature is too high.

[Radiator]

Some graphics cards do have temperature sensors , while others do not .
What card do you have ?

[wyz135]

PowerColor Radeon x1300PRO

[Radiator]

As far as I can remember , that card doesn't have thermal sensors . I could be mistaken ofcourse .
Anyway , I don't see a point in OCing that card , you can't get much of a boost in performance I think .

[wyz135]

so at least i can get more FPS when i play games

[Radiator]

A 2 FPS boost is close to nothing - no visual difference .
Don't bother . Buy a better video card , if you want better frames per second in games .

[wyz135]

because I play Half-Life2 I only get around 30-35 FPS with 2x AA, max settings, without AA I can acheive 40-45 FPS, if I overclock a little I may acheive a better performance, anyway I regret buying this Radeon X1300PRO:(

[Radiator]

I get the same FPS with HDR ( Episode 1 ) and no AA at 1280x1024 .
Turn the AA off , at your monitor's native resolution , it virtually makes zero difference anyway . I use a X1600 Pro .

[wyz135]

my card's AA really slows the speed down, is all ATi cards like that?

[Radiator]

The slowing down is caused by the low amount of memory bandwidth .
The X1900 cards have superior AA and non- AA performance compared to the GeForce 7900 cards . 2xAA doesn't slow games down for me , neither does it make them look better .

[wyz135]

but now ATi's Radeon HD2900XT bandwidth seems to beat nvidia's bandwidth, Radeon HD2900XT has 512-bit, while GeForce 8800GTX has only 384-bit, but why so many people complain Radeon HD2900XT's AA really slow down the performance?

[Radiator]

Because it uses it's shaders to do any kind of AA . Not it's ROPs .
The 8800 GTX uses it's ROPs to do AA .

[wyz135]

is that the reason why it has 320 Shader Processor?

[Radiator]

It actually has 256 , the other 64 are "special function" processors .
Anyway , I suppose so . Without AA , it actually beats the 8800 GTX , with it , it is faster than a 8800 GTS , but not by a large margin .

[wyz135]

that's why it is meant to compete with the GeForce 8800GTS instead of GeForce 8800GTX

[Radiator]

There was supposed to be a 1GB GDDR4 HD 2900 XTX released , which was meant to compete with the 8800 GTX , but it was scrapped . However Diamond made a 1GB GDDR4 HD 2900 XT . It's exactly as fast as the 512MB GDDR3 one .

[wyz135]

PowerColor also had one HD2900XT which is also 1GB GDDR4, I am not so sure about it's performance, but why ATi abandon the plan to release the Radeon HD2900XTX to compete with the GeForce 8800GTX, it may even beat GeForce 8800Ultra, isn't that a dumb mistake made by ATi to abandon the plan to release the Rdeon HD2900XTX?

[Radiator]

The HD 2900 XTX was planned to have a slightly higher core clock and a much higher memory clock . Basically what the HD 2900 XT 1GB GDDR4 is . It's exactly as fast as the 512MB GDDR3 one in games , because the memory bandwidth isn't the problem . Neither is the amount of vRAM .
And what does overclocking do to a HD 2900 XT right now ? Virtually nothing , because you cant do any exessive overclocks on it .

[wyz135]

so the HD2900XT 1GB GDDR4 is just have improved memory?

[Radiator]

Basically yeah . And the 128GB/s doesn't improve anything , because the bandwidth isn't the bottleneck .