video card questions : help !

AMD owns ATI now - so in theory their drivers might work together a bit better. But in practice I think nVidia has a bit of an advantage for stability. Any AGP video card should do the trick.

More money = more detail and smoothness in the 3d games.

 

Here is a good place to start:

http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics.html

 

No, you do not have to use an nVidia graphics card because the motherboard has an nVidia chip set. ATI will work perfectly well and it’s doubtful there’d be any performance or stability advantage to an nVidia graphics cards based on motherboard compatibility. I’ve built many systems over the years using both nVidia and ATI graphics and, once established software drivers are available, have never found one brand to be more stable than the other.

Bare in mind when choosing graphics cards, the cooling fans can create a fair noise, and while the fanless designs are silent, they tend to increase the temperature inside the case a bit, you need good case fans and air flow to make the most of these.

Also with MS Vista on the horizon and the possibility of direct X 10 games and graphics cards becoming the norm in the future, I’d want to limit my investment in a graphics card right now.

This is all probably more info than you want. So, assuming you’re running games at say a resolution of 1280 x 1024 and not some 24” monitor set up, then 256MB should be sufficient. I’d go for a nVidia GT (7600 or 7800) series, they have faster memory than the GS series. In the UK market right now I’m not aware of ATI having AGP cards that can compete with these.

Hope this helps

 

Speaking of graphics cards...

I got a PC that has a built in graphics card (ATI Radeon Express 200). It is a Celeron D 3.2Ghz so its not the fastest, but I want to be able to play battlefield and americas army at a reasonable resolution and framerate.

What video card for around the $200-250 range would be good? Its got a PCI express x16 slot thats available. Its hooked up to a 19" LCD monitor that has a native resolution of 1280x1024 so *ideally* I could run maybe 30-40fps at that resolution, but if not, then as long as I could do maybe 800x600 or 1024x768 at 30-40fps I would be happy.

Is there such a card? What do you recommend?

 

I have a ATI Radeon X1600 256 MB that came with my MacBook Pro, I haven't tested it out yet with any games. From what I understand it's about as fast as the Nvidia 7200 card. My main problem is I'm limited to what types of games for my Mac.

My old Windows machine has a 5200FX with 256 MB video card, runs Battlefield II ok but very slow with Quake 4.

I spoke with someone at Quakecon this year about the Nvidia 7600 cards, nice card but you got to have strong power supply to run it & an excellent cooling system. You should be fine with that choice.

 

You are a lot better off asking this on some tech sites or gaming sites.
I gave up trying to keep up with hardware 8 years ago, everything I have is absolutely ancient - and works great for what I need (I don't 'game').

 

Yeah, I am sure you are right.

I gave up too - I used to be so into it but it seems to be changing so quickly. I dont know the difference between terms like dual core, core duo, core duo extreme, extreme edition, hyperthreading, xeon, celeron, and things like XP, XP2, 64, Opteron, Sempron and all that on the AMD side. I was at Staples a couple weeks back and saw a PCI version of an ATI Radeon X1300. I thought the PCI bus was a tad slow for a fast GFX card, but I know that around a year or so ago, an ATI Radeon X850 Pro was the baddest of the bad, so X1300 sounded superior. Well, after poring over specs, it seems its not. Its *extremely* confusing for someone who doesn't read the trade pubs to make an on-the-spot decision regarding what hardware to get. They are likely to go into Circuit City and get an ill-fitting recommendation by a 16-year old kid who doesn't know jack, and then have a bad experience (or not as fulfilling as they wanted) with the hardware, leaving a bad taste on that brand of product. IMO the hardware OEMs are doing themselves a disservice by making it so convoluted.

I remember when a Celeron was a Pentium with the cache disabled and a slower bus... now there are a TON of different celeron types with varying features. Oy vey!