Question Dell 750ti 08MXMJ OEM card. DDR3 or GDDR5 ram onboard?

[yruummya]

I was looking for a cheap GPU (hard task right now) for an XP retro gaming PC. I bought the card listed in the title. Seemed the OEMs sell for cheaper because of stock clocks and lame looks. But the key big difference was it was listed as having DDR3 ram (and other resale posts have it too which made me believe it could be an OEM cheaping out and not a typo), and I've seen the comparisons between equivalent cards with the different RAM types (like GT 1030) and the performance difference is huge. I got it anyway, but GPU-Z is reporting GDDR5 RAM. Any chance GPU-Z could be wrong? Or did I just discover a pleasant surprise. I can't find any info for the card 08MXMJ, no spec sheet or anything. My Passmark 9 3D Graphics Mark is 1841 and their site says the benchmark is 3936, but I'm running it on XP so I wonder if the DX10/11/12 parts of the test are whats dragging it down?

Anyways, if anyone could shed light on what I've got on my hands that would be very helpful, thanks.

 

[Joseph_138]

750Ti should have GDDR5. You may have bought a Chinese fake if it has DDR3. Also, DX 10 was introduced with Windows Vista and DX 12 was introduced with Windows 10. It's doubtful that you will be able to run them on XP. A 750Ti is going to be overkill under XP, which is limited to DX 9.

 

[yruummya]

OK, great news that DDR3 was never a legitimate option for 750ti. I think I scored a good deal because it was mislabeled. I'm pretty sure its not fake. It looks exactly like the nvidia reference card and GPU-Z reports all the standard info for 750ti.

I can understand why you say 750ti is overkill for XP because its from 2014, but its the best sub-75 watt GPU with XP support and its just about as cheap as GPUs go, so no sense in getting older cards. That said, Crysis at 1080 with antialiasing x8 and everything on high still only gets 30 fps, so not totally overkill!

My comment on Directx was mainly about whether the lack of OS support would hurt passmark tests that rely on those libs to run the 3d graphics test. Because my score was much lower than the average. Other than having no stock OC.

Just for completeness, system is Alienware x51 r1 running XP 32 bit with i3-2120. the 750ti is a Dell board, so there's also that OEM synergy

 

[Joseph_138]

What is your CPU? That will also be a determining factor if the GPU is overkill for the system. I recently pulled a Q6600 system out for some experiments, and determined that a 650Ti is going to be close to the ideal GPU for that chip. Anything faster than that will be CPU bound, so there's no point upgrading it beyond that, because there is no more performance to be gained from the upgrade. The only real advantage would be longer driver support with something newer, but new drivers tend to focus on the newest, fastest GPU's and frequently sacrifice performance of older, slower ones, so longer driver support may not have the benefits that you think it does. It may actually make performance worse if you are using the oldest GPU that the driver supports. I also discovered that a GTX 750 non-ti would consume less power, than the 650Ti for the same level of performance with that CPU, but 700 series cards are more expensive than 600 series cards thanks to the mining craze. 600 series cards can still be had for reasonable prices, if that's all you need for an older machine. Maybe when I can get one for $25-30, I'll buy it, but not for $100. Being dropped from driver support might help prices on those cards to come down faster, though.

 

[yruummya]

I've got the 750ti paired with an i3-2120. Interestingly, GPU-Z log data during Crysis gameplay (1920x1080, x8 AA, all high settings on XP x86) Records the GPU load at 100% most of the time with dips into the 90s, so it looks like I'm still GPU bound (at least in this use-case). Pretty crazy for a game that came out 7 years before the GPU.

I'm still trying to figure out the meaning of all the GPU-Z log data, but most important for the original question is that the memory bandwidth was never saturated which puts to rest the DDR3 concern. So sale post was mis-labelled and the Dell OEM card is simply a reference card.

Regarding your price concerns, I've found used OEM cards to be the best bargain maybe because people judge them by their boring looks and limited OC because of the smaller coolers. The ASIC quality is 70% though which I gather is low, so maybe Nvidia gives lower quality chips to OEMs, but that's just a guess on my sample size of one.

For me, I like the understated look. It looks no better than the first GPU I ever got: FX 5500, and yet I'm playing Crysis on it