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Old October 2nd 03, 05:19 PM
Bas Ruiter
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Well... the 5200 is adequate if it's performance is all you need. It's
up to yourself to decide that.

For a certain price you will get a cards from ATi and nVidia that will
perform roughly the same, assuming the features are the same. You pay
more for more performance and/or features.

You may be interested to learn that ATi have two new cards out: the 9800
XT and 9600 XT. The latter is a sub $199 card, based on the 9700 core
but with only 4 pipelines. Because it's clocked higher than the original
9700 it should beat the latter in all benchmarks.

For comparisons, see:

http://www.hardware.info/reviews.php?id=430&page=3

There's also the newcomer XGI Technology, with the "Volari" chipset. We
don't have any benchmarks yet, but they claim to be on par with ATi and
nVidia.

What determines performance is (1) chipset, (2) the speed (MHz) it runs
at, (3) memory speed.

MSI cards are fine. Our PC's (Medion) use them, and we rarely get
returns, and if we do it's mostly to replace the cooling fan because
they've become noisy. (Talking about GeForce2 and 3 cards here).

Jaton I don't know. Chaintech is a good brand, as is Leadtek. LeadTek
used to have quite a good reputation for making videocards, actually,
but they been a bit quiet the last year or two. PNY (Pine, XFX, etc etc)
is a 'cheap' brand but they're not necesarily bad.

I bought a XFX Geforce4 Ti4200 ViVo last December that got great
reviews, and I been pretty happy with it. Can't tell you (yet) how long
it's going to last... it's a gamble I took when I bought it.

--
Bas Ruiter

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