ScoobyJawa

My folks need a cheapo new graphics card for their PC to replace their current on board graphics.

They don't do anything special with it so just want a cheapo card to help free up the system memory which is currently used for the onboard.

Around 30 quid theres:

GeForce2 MX 400 64MB SDR RAM AGP Graphics Card
ATI Radeon 7000GPU 64Mb SDR AGP TV Out Graphics Card ATICGC

Which is the better of the two, or which would you go for over the other?

Cheers
Neil

Rasher

sorry to hijack the thread, does anyone rate a ATI Radeon R9000,64MB DDR SDRAM graphics accelerator???? or is it pants????

[Edited by Rasher - 4/7/2003 6:27:34 PM]

[Edited by Rasher - 4/7/2003 6:28:42 PM]

Mr Footlong

iTrader: (7)

Have a look at this for raw comparison numbers:

http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic...218/index.html

Pretty close to the truth.

If it is for playing today's games and beyond, then I would say don't get it personally.

Cheers,

Nick

dfullerton

Get a 9500 128 card and turn it into a 9700 pro

Mr Footlong

iTrader: (7)

I am not going to get dragged into arguing the case against the above statement, but I will say this. In no way are you absolutely guaranteed to convert one. I know all about these cards and the ones on sale saying this can be done and in a lot of cases this seems to be true (atleast getting them to Radeon 9700 speeds, NOT Pro a lot of the time), BUT even the makers of the software patch's FAQ, they mention this also. Take a gamble by all means, but it is not a dead cert.

Nick.

ScoobyJawa

Nick,

Thanks for the reply The machine is not really going to be used for games at all - maybe a little photo work from my dad's digi cam but thats about it. He's managed with the on-board for long enough so these cards would do fine more than likely. Its mainly to get the graphics off the mobo and free up the system memory its currently swallowing.

Machine is currently a Celeron 700mhz with 128MB RAM. In the process of upping that to a Celeron 1.3Ghz, and the new card should be more than enough for what they want to do! Then some more mem at a later date.

Cheers for the thoughts
Neil.

ChrisB

Interesting UT2003 graph on Tom's.

I wonder where my Matrox G400 32MB comes in?

ScoobyJawa

G400 - lol I had a G200 on my old work PC

Well, looking at the scores - even though it isn't hugely important - the Geforce beats the Radeon at all but 1 test so I'll go with that for the folks, its also a couple of quid cheaper - bonus!

Mr Footlong

iTrader: (7)

If gaming was ever on the cards, which to be honest with those cards and today's games, they would choke a fair bit, then there is very, very little in it between them. At least where D3D is concerned. In openGL, the is slightly better performance from the MX, but still pretty pap tbh. That is taking into account that you would most lilely be gaming at 1024x768 resolution.

Now is hardcore gheyming is not on tha cards at all, then I would consider Image quality to be of the greatest importance. Unfortunatly, I am not sure about the image quality of that age of Radeon, but the MX is nothing special and I have seen many, many of those MX's. If anyone with an older Radeon can comment on here, or if someone has the time to come up with some image quality info, then that would be useful. For normal desktop use, the speed of the 2 cards will be virtually identical methinks.

All that I know is that certainly from the Radeon 8500 onwards, Image quality transferred through to the monitor is top notch. However, if you have a pants monitor, you won't really notice any difference anyway

Cheers,

Nick

[Edited by Mr Footlong - 4/7/2003 6:19:33 PM]