Printable View
For the money, I think a GeForce 2 Ti would be right up your alley. That seems to be an excellent middle of the road, semi-highend card. Going with AMD processors seem to help as well. P4, and Celeron are just too slow, and over-priced. Unless you FEAR using AMD for some reason, AMD chips are definitely recommended.
[quote]Originally posted by Ryuutsume:
<strong> P4, and Celeron are just too slow,</strong><hr></blockquote>
I am not going to get into this debate, but have you used a Northwood core P4??? You will be very surprised.
hey....
again..what you rightfully suggest costs here about twice as much you said...
for better or worse this is what i bought :
NVIDIA GeForce2 MX400 GPU
• AGP BUS or PCI
• 64MB
• 200MHz Core Clock
• 166MHz Memory Clock
• 350MHz RAMDAC
• API Support for DirectX®, OpenGL ICD® for windows
• VGA Connector and TV/S-video Out*
256-bit 3D and 2D graphics accelerator
• NVIDIA Shading Rasterizer™
• Integrated Second Generation Transform and Lighting Engines
• 4 Texels per clock
• 32-bit color with 32-bit z/stencil
• Cube environment mapping
• DirectX and S3 texture compression
• High Definition Video Processor (HDVP)
• AGP 4X
i haven't tested it with the new games yet but i will very soon.
one question though...i installed both win me and xp each on a separate partition and there is a BIG difference with the directx diagnostics.i ran the "test direct 3d/direct draw" on the win me and the cube started spinning like there's no tommorow...but on win xp the cube didn't spin nearly as fast..same goes for the direct draw test...(i installed the latest nvidia drivers 28.32..With a new Pentium 4 1.6Ghz)
DOES that mean that games will run slowly on the XP ?????
[quote]Originally posted by Radical Dreamer:
<strong>
If you want to stay with a low cost high performance card take a look at the GF 3 Ti200 or even the GeForce 2 GTS, you can pick one up online for somewhere in the neighborhood of $90-100 and htey have DDR memory and draw a substantial amount more polygons per second, not to mention the fact that the memory bandwidth is much higher</strong><hr></blockquote>
Yup, the Geforce2 is still a pretty good card.. I've had mine for over a year now and i'm very happy with it. Mine's an ASUS 7700 Pro Pure (64 meg DDR) and i have it overclocked STABLE at the Ultra speeds. It takes the newer games without a glitch and that's with a 800 MHZ Processor.
From the looks of the upgrade, you'll be happy with any of the newer video cards. The differences between the cards are minor (well relatively). nVidia works on brute force, where ATI tries to finess things better.. Either way, You'll be estatic with your purchase.
by the way, what happened to those nice geforce 2 ultra cards? they seem to have disapeared off the market. pity - they were good little cards as they were the only one of the geforce 2 family that had more enhancements than just upping clock speeds
I just got a GeForce 2 GTS-V and found many others at <a href="http://www.pricewatch.com" target="_blank">www.pricewatch.com</a> and it was only $53.72 total, with tax and S&H. It is a very good card, especially for the money and reacts pretty well to overclocking (mine is only revision B, revision C is supposed to be way better :) )
I have to say that you made a good choice, Vulcan. I've had my GF2 MX-400 card for quite some time and it can run pretty much everything even at regular clock speeds. Of course, overclocking would allow it perform even better. Just make sure you don't crank the GPU speed to like 400 MHz. :D <img border="0" title="" alt="[Wink]" src="wink.gif" />