9700Pro on SIS 655 chipset and buying decision issues

[s_c]

Hi,

I understood that there have been compatibility issues for Ati 9700 on SIS 648 chipsets. As I own a Gigabyte 8SQ800 motherboard with a SIS 655 (dual-channel) chipset and am looking at a 9700 (Pro or non-Pro) as an upgrade posibility for my current 4600Ti, naturally I am concerned with this history.

Does any of you own a 9700 on a SIS 655 / Pentium 4 and running WinXP? If so, did you have any issues with this combination?


On another hand, the only Ati video card I ever owned is the one on my laptop - hardly a gaming platform; so my experience with Ati products with regards to gaming non-existant (well, actually I ran Vietcong on my laptop and it was OK).

So far, the only bad things I've read / heard about Ati is that the drivers and compatibility are crap. On the other hand, nVidia have worse image quality, have been proven to be cheating in benchmarks and there is an entire mistery about the real DX9 performance of the FX (both 5800 and 5900), with respect to PS 2.0. Oh, yes, and they're expensive.

Still - an expensive, not so great-looking image, not so fast card may be better than one does crash / BSOD in every other game. So, based on your experience - are indeed the 9700 / 9800 (I don't care about any other, lesser model) plagued by compatibility and/or stability issues. OR are the drivers rock-solid?

TIA,

Sebastian

PS: please, try to concentrate on BOTH my questions (the SIS chipset compatibility AND on driver stability ones). From what I've seen on forums, the latter is certainly more "apealing", especially to a certain... class of respondents, but I am certainly NOT going to change my motherboard in order to get an ATI video card.

Thanks,

Sebastian


PPS: Where I live (E. Europe) the prices are... "offset" from those in US with abt. 2-3 months. So, right now, a 9700Pro or an FX5800 (non-Ultra, NON-dustblower) would be about $400 (incl. tax) and a 9800Pro / FX5900 non-Ultra about $550 - $600. 5900 Ultra is way off and certainly not worth it.

So, my natural choice would be 9700Pro vs. FX5800 non-Ultra (again - with a reasonable cooling system). A review on Tom's HW places them at roughly the same performance (give or take). As a soon-to-be-former (and very satisfied) 4600Ti owner, I was inclining towards the 5800. BUT, after the pixel shader performance sintetics / UT antialiasing "oprimisation" / 128 bit memory bus a.s.o. right now I am more inclining towards the 9700. But I AM a bit SCARED about the drivers and the compatibility issues.

Think you can help with any fundamented, professional opinion on the differences between the architectures and/or the shader's speed?

I quite at a loss here. I am really trying to make an informed decision and simply can't do it.

Thanks in advance for your opinion and thanks for taking the time to read a rather lengthy post.

Sebastian

:confused: :confused: :confused:

[shmall]

Originally posted by s_c
Hi,


Does any of you own a 9700 on a SIS 655 / Pentium 4 and running WinXP? If so, did you have any issues with this combination?




I have a 9700pro (Crucial) running in a Gigabyte SQ800 (dual channel) with 1GB of PC3500 and a P4 2.8 @3.2GHz on WinXP (home)....and would like to report no serious problems/conflicts at all :)

Runs reel sweet and alot better in all my games/sims than my Ti4600 did, also awesome to be able to use FSAA and AF without the huge fps hit I had with my old ti4600.

You should enjoy it :)

btw, I use CAT-3.6, F5 (modified) bios (gives alittle more juice to the DDR) AGP 1.16 (sis) drivers :)



Simon.

[Dazz]

The only chipset that has problems with the Radeon 9700Pro is the SIS 645 board the 645FX board fixes the problems.

[s_c]

OK, thank you for your replys. Based on them and what I've seen (or rather have not seen) on rage3d I gather there is no problem in having a 9700(Pro) on a SIS 655 chipset.

So I guess I'll be going for a 9700 then, as I can see no reason for buying a 5800. Hope I don't get burned with the drivers, though.

Thanks!

Sebastian

[Dazz]

Well keep up updated when you get it hmm :)

[omv]

I ran a 9500pro with a SIS 655 chipset and everything was fine - I'd expect the 9700 would be fine.

One thing that really pissed me off though was the SIS chipset would freeze my keyboard completely during CS matches and I'd have to reboot to reset it. This happened with both the 648 and 655 (using both NV & ATI cards, and two different keyboards). Pissed me off enough I switched to an i865 chipset.