Funkii Munkii

This has probably been asked before but I need a new graphics card as mine (ATI 3D rage IIc) is 4 years old and sh1te and doesnt support OpenGL so i cant play quake online.

Also because im not a techy can i only have a PCI?? looking at device manager it says "3d Rage II + PCI" or can I have an AGP, most of the cards ive seen on the net are AGP.

I'm not going to be gaming all the time just occassionally so it doesnt have to be the dogs nads, just competant, between £70 - £120.

Do any have a TV card built in so i can watch the telly on my PC, as i said im clueless so all info will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Dave

Mr Footlong

iTrader: (7)

Lots of things to look at first. You need to find out if you have an AGP port inside you machine.m 97 is pretty borderline for AGP, but you might be lucky. If your machine is in a towere case, then if you open it you should see (if standard motherboard) 2-3 6 inch long slots(ISA) (possibly filled), followed by 2-3 3-4inch slots (PCI) (possibly filled). Now, if you are lucky you will have 1 additional above all of these that id not in line with all the other slots. It should be about the size of a pci slot, but start about 1 inch back from all the others.

Other thing to do: Find out what motherboard you have or what PC you have, then post it up here and we shall find out for you instead!

When you say quake, do you mean quake3? If you are running that on a 4 year old machine that has not been upgraded CPU-wise etc, then regardless of what graphics card you get, it is going to choke, big-time.

ATI are actually pretty much the top dogs for all-in-one cards(tv etc built in). If you don't have an AGP slot, then I will be amazed if you can get hold of anything resemblling a post-prehistoric PCI Graphics/TV card
DOH, just remembered that ATI have a All in Wonder Radeon PCI board available). Minimum realistically IMO would be one of the ATI Rage 128-based all-in-one cards. However, it's gaming performance and compatability leave a lot to be desired, unfortunatly
This leaves you going towrds the ATI Radeon family. As mentioned above, available in both PCI and AGP. Good card, not the best, but you don't need the best. Will still pretty well kill your machine if you are running less than a PII-400IMO. Will fly on machines above 700Mhz.

Sory mate, reckon you'll be lucky getting Decent TV and Graphics performance in a card for the money you are talking, but I could well be wrong.

Hope some of this helps,


Nick

Edited because what I think I am typing and what is coming off the keyboard are 2 completely different things!

[Edited by Mr Footlong - 12/28/2001 3:57:59 PM]

Funkii Munkii

Cheers Nick

There is a lot to digest there, I can tell you I recently (8 months ago, i know this is ages ago in the computer world) upgraded to a Pentium III 833Mhz 128MB memory (mother board replaced at the same time), I have the manual for the mother board at home, I will open up the tower tomorrow morning before i leave for work and If I cant see an AGP port I will post the mother board details.

Many thanks for you help.

Dave

InvisibleMan

I have a geforce on a 350mhz machine & its ok. The graphics cards with GPUs are cool cos they allow you to have a lesser machine, it makes use of system memory & disc space which is in abunadance these days. Made mine myself and it runs sweet...

Mr Footlong

iTrader: (7)

Unless you got a budget motherboard with onboard graphics (never seen one with rageII-c built on, way old, so doubtful), you will 99.9999999999999999% certainly have an AGP port. GPU cards(GF1-GF3, Radeon)x do a lot of the processing themselves, but don't be fooled, they need a lot of cpu to start with, which usually means faster tranfer of data to the GPU for processing before the GPU becomes particularly beneficial. If the card is sitting waiting on a slower machine that can't transfer data very quickly across it's bus, then it chokes. Wouldn't run a GF1 on anything lower than a PII-300.

Cheers,


Nick

HHxx

Just some info.

AGP slots are normally brown. By the middle of the board.
PCI slots are normally white. Middle to edge of motherboard.
ISA slost are normally black. Near edge of motherboard.

Looking at the cpu speed it looks like a new board with a 133mhz bus. AGP slot 99% certain

H

Shark

Just bought a system with a nVidia GeoForce 3, 64mb Ti200. So far its the dogs.

David

Funkii Munkii

Thanks Guys
So the good news is I can 99.9999% have an AGP graphics card, just looking around and saw the "creative GeForce 2 Titanium" £116, is this any good or does anyone recomend anything else and yes it was Quake 3 Nick .

Cheers
Dave

Funkii Munkii

Right have found the mother board details and its GA-6vxe7+ via apollo pro family AGPset
Me thinks an agp card is in order so back to the initial question what can i get for between £80-£120, i dont do loads of gaming but want something competant.
Thanks

InvisibleMan

if you just want something competent go for a creative TNT2 32mb card- more than capable at low cost. gonna get slated im sure but its quite easy to go over the top & get something you dont really need.

Mr Footlong

iTrader: (7)

Right...

Not being at all biased to Hercules at all, it's just that I have had a few different ones through my hands recently:

3D Prophet II Titanium 64MB DDR AGP OEM VO (A la Dabs) £113.97 Inc VAT&DEL

(Basically identical to a GF2 Pro, from what I can remember)
save yourself almost £30 by going OEM over Retail. Still get the manual and the Driver/etc cd, just saves you paying for the box and freecy nasty game that comes along.....
Very strong performer in 16-bit(65k) colour. Contrary to what some say, 32-bit(16.7M) really isn't a necessity at all in games as far as I am concerned. I run a Ti500 in 16 bit colour and see virtually no difference between the 2 except that 32 bit is slower.......
Very impressed with these particular cards. Got one for a colleague a couple of weeks ago and he is blissfully happy with it. Also, probably not of interest, but conservativly clocked (Core,250Mhz, MEM,400Mhz). These puppies are built to go quicker than this and I have found the best setup with perfect stability to be 260 core, 430 RAM. Walk in the park for this card and hey, if Hercules didn't like the idea, then they wouldn't have the overclocking options built into their software!
IMO Make sure that you have a case fan built into the front of your case, pretty well all Nvidia cards need a little air circulation in the case for reliable operation.


3D Prophet 4500 PowerVR KyroII 64MB AGP OEM (A la Dabs) £62.27 inc VAT, small suplement for delivery required

Very good for what they cost, at least that's what 3 of us thought when trawling through reviews earlier this year. Their performance seemed too good to be true, beating off MX based cards and GTS+ models in selected tests. Other feature was native 32-bit graphics construction, meaning that their was virtually no loss in performance running 32-bit colour. For that sort of money, we got 3. Surprise, surprise, they were good, but not as good as we had anticipated. More recent comparison reviews came online and all of a sudden she was getting beaten pretty convincingly by practically all GF2-based cards etc..... A bit gutted, but a very good card for it's price range. Just don't benchmark it, you won't like what you see!
Not a true mainstream card, so the Benchmarks produce misleading results at times...
Good for gaming, but missed the boat methinks....
Good support from hercules, as they pretty well solely produce this card chipset(bar Videologic and possibly a couple of others)

My vote: GF2 Titanium every time. Don't touch a lesser MX based model, they get whipped six ways from sunday by their bigger brother!


Cheers,

Nick.

P.S. Keep the old card handy, as you might need it to boot off of to get into the bios to alter it. The GF2 series of cards are quite power hungry and sometimes require modifying of the bios, telling the Motherboard what power exactly to provide the AGP slot. I have had it 2 or 3 times with the GF2's. Most apollo pro 133-based boards have this in the advanced chipset menu of the BIOS(Set to DA or EA). While you are in there, enable agp fast writes and AGP 4X, as the cards support both. Find primary vga device and set to AGP,instead of PCI. Once you have sorted all of this,power down, remove the Old cackola card and away you go!
Also, don't use the Herc drivers, download the 23.11 drivers from nvidia. Bring up display properties after, advanced. Geforce 2 tab, direct3d settings, set quality to best performance instead of best image quality, openGL, make sure that OpenGL vsync off by default and most importantly, antialiasing, set to manual control and set to off, trust me, don't bother with it!

InvisibleMan

my, havent they improved over a matter of months, scrap wot i said, im with him--^

Mr Footlong

iTrader: (7)

InvisibleMan, I kinda agree with your recommendation, but the 2 guys that I mentioned above went from a TNT2-32Mb(pro's or whatever the high-end ones were) to the KyroII's. This whipped it hands down and didn't make games like Serious Sam stutter even vaguely as much. Image quality tons better as well. For the money, you'd be mad to got TNT2 over KyroII.
Again, the GF2 Ti kills both of these and isn't expensive when you look at the market. Classified as a borderline 'Midrange' OEM card IMO. TNT2/GF2MX and KyroII all classified as 'Budget' cards.


Cheers,


Nick

InvisibleMan

your right considering the price. its just bizarre but i have the tnt2 32mb on a 350mhz & it all runs quite sweet. Im sure there must be other factors in it. I hear sometimes in pcworld people being told they need the latest (and most expensive) equipment which just aint the case. Ive actually been told off by PC World for interferring

I just hate novice families being ripped off

Funkii Munkii

Nick

Thanks for all the info,very very helpful and much appreciated. of all the ones ive seen I had earmarked the one you mentioned!!

Dave

Mr Footlong

iTrader: (7)

I too love walking into PC world and laughing occasionally at what I hear/come across. I was desperate for a 300+PSU a few days ago, so popped into PC world for a gamble. Upon asking if they they had any decent 300Watt PSU's in stock, I was asked was it for a laptop . 'No, it's for a PC'. Upon recieving this information, I was presented with a figure of Eight power lead! I too frequently correct the poor buggers when I overhear them talking complete cod to customers

Cheers,


Nick

Edited to say that I haven't been told off yet!(probably due to being twice their size and a skinhead)

[Edited by Mr Footlong - 12/29/2001 4:07:09 PM]

InvisibleMan

LOL

Dirty_Den

Try keeping an eye open on:

http://www.scan.co.uk/today.htm

When they are open again. I bought a GeForce 2 based card from them, handles Return To Castle Wolfenstein fairly well. Or wait until the GeForce 3 based cards come down in price - they will eventually!

Den

Sith

The Geforce cards can be quite dependant on CPU power. I had a TNT2 card on a PII 400. Upgraded to a GF2 card and things were slightly slower but improved with later driver support. Bought RTCW, got a point in the game where everything slowed down and almost stoppped. Upgraded the CPU and the card flies quite happily.

When the GF series cards came out, all the mags said there was no point in buying one unless you had the cpu to drive them.

And yes I know they have a GPU on board, but still seem to require a fair amount of CPU power to help along the way. Specially when scenes get quite involved.

P.

Alas

Hi m8
I just got a Voodoo TV card off ebay for cheap and must admit its great. Able to watch the footie while working/on the net etc. Even the wife likes it as it keeps me out of her way.
Would definitely recommend.
Alasdair

Steve Perriam

could not resist the first corner of 2002

i'm still using 32mb ge force pro.....does gr8

dont see need for £300 ge force 3 yet ?

radeon getting good reviews though and much cheaper so i would consider it.

JGRIFF

I'm about to upgrade my graphics card, currently an Nvidia Ge Force 2 64Mb, for a Ge Force 3, so if you are interested e-mail me off line

PeterPerfect

GForce 3 Ti200 can be had for £172.....£300 is for the Ti500.
Some Ti200 cards can be clocked up to Ti500 performance levels.....

mattski2

If £120 is your max amount then a Geforce card of some description will be hard to beat imho, if you can spend a bit more and your cpu/motherboard/ram is upto it get a Geforce 3 and you will grin like a beast...

M

AndiThompson

If you can afford (and want to) fork out the money the GF3 Ti500 is an excellent card thats full of features. On the other hand, the new ATi 8500 is also excellent (even out performs the GF3 on some tests) but comes in just below the £200 mark.

Personally, I'm going to go for the ATi when I have the cash as I cant be bothered waiting while I save up the extra £100.

Funkii Munkii

Thanks to all for all the advice and help, ordered a card on sat, relying on dabs to deliver now!