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Old July 14th 03, 08:29 AM
Ron Merts
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I'd look at something around the FX 5600 Ultra if you can swing around $300.
The 5900 is definitely a kick-butt video card. Benchmarks be damned, it's
lightning fast and it's drivers are very stable; the ATi card is definitely
fast, I'll give it that but the drivers are an absolute crap-shoot.
Sometimes the ATi drivers are good, other times they'll make you want to
kill yourself with all the problems. If you want the 3D glasses, nVidia is
definitely the way to go, and the 5600 Ultra with the v2 version of the chip
is definitely a stellar performer. The Prolink 5600 Gold Limited (something
like that, it's definitely the longest name for a video card I've ever seen)
and the Albatron received good marks from several reviews for speed and
features; and you should be able to stay under that $300 cap. If you'd
really rather stick around $200, the GeForce FX 5200 Ultra is not a bad
card. I can get 3DMark2001SE scores of 11000+ with them every time, and
playing Neverwinter Nights, UT 2003 and Freelancer with one is as good or
better than my old Ti4600, plus I get DirectX9 and OpenGL 1.3 support in
hardware. I'm NOT saying that benchmark framerates are as high as with the
Ti4600, but the video is definitely comparable and honestly I notice no
difference on my son's Athlon XP 2500+ system. I have not tried it on an XP
1800+ CPU, but it works very nicely on P4 2.8C, 3.06, 3.0 and Athlon XP 2500
processors - especially for under $200.

Ron

wrote in message
...

OS: Win98 and XP (on two separate drives)
CPU: AMD XP1800
MB: Shuttle
Monitor: Daewoo 19" 905D

I currently own a Nvidia FX 5200 by Megaspeed (MS). I bought it because

it was
very cheap and I wanted to test the waters, as it were. If I upgrade from

here,
which Nvidia should I buy? I might could afford around $300+ (I would

have to
sell allot of stuff on ebay first, LOL).
I am used to the ATI Radeon 9700, but because it has no Stereo-3D support

I'm
probably going to be selling it (I actually downgraded to the Nvidia FX

5200 so
I could test Stereo-3D).

So, is the GeForce FX series the one I want? That is, should I just shoot

for
the highest FX model I can afford? Is the GeForce FX 5900 the best nvidia

for
consumers? (All the other models on the nvidia site didn't look like they

were
for game playing or regular consumers). Is the FX 5200 so inferior that I

should
upgrade now? Or just wait for the next Nvidia offering?

Thanks for any info.........Sam