I am about to upgrade my video card, which is an ATI Radeon 9000. What are the differences of the video cards available? and which ones do you folks recommend for gaming and such. Lastly, does anyone have a better one than mine that they are not using and want to sell to me.

Thanks for the help.

I have the radeon 9700 pro.

I do a fair share of gaming and this card can handle it all. I always like staying a generation or so behind on video cards to take advantage of the pricing.

the radeon 9000 does not support directx 9.x , so you might want to keep this in mind. maybe go with a 9600 series instead?

Thanks. That is what i figured. I found this one

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewI...AMEWA%3AIT&rd=1

Is this what you are using?

i'm running a NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200, 128 MB of RAM, DirectX 9, OpenGL and all the other goodies ...

i play games A LOT and this one is still flying, altought it's NOT top of the line anymore ...

Andy

yup, same card.

I have the Radeon 9600XT and it is plenty fine for my needs...unfortunately I never have time to play games anymore. I have a fairly burly PC and a PS2 here, but I spend all my free time surfing this board & watching Dragon Tales or Clifford

9700 here too

Radeon 9600 here as well. It handles Thief: Deadly shadows well, so it works for me.

Video cards these days are ALL ABOUT GAMING. It's all about how well the card can render a 3D scene in real time, and how close to real it is capable of getting it. The advances in the technology are too fast for me to bother trying to keep on top of it, I would go to somwhere like tomshardware.com or arstechnica (also search on slashdot), where there are armys of people that test these products to the hilt to figure out what is best and fastest.

There are a couple of other things that might sway your decision - multiple monitor support, SVGA outputs, some cards have TV tuners built in.

Most modern cards have more than enough RAM for anything you want to do - so again this comes down to rendering scenes in Quake-like games.

the new radeons are very sweet... I still have a geforce and it still rocks, but if I were buying a new one, ATI is the way to go... even if they are a little more $$ often...

check out this website:

http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/index.html

Tom's Hardware has always been very good...

I've never found that you need top of the line though... software is way behind hardware these days on the video side...

Anyone know about what a good cheap card is for DVI out?

I just picked up a Nvidia GX 5200 in order to drive my 23" Apple Studio display (this on a P4 Win 2000 box). To my rude surprise it seems to only drive it at 640x480. Whenever I set the output to DVI all my resoloution options except for 640 and 800 go away. I read somewhere that they work fine on Linux but not on Win. Lazy programmers I guess.....

I don't need gaming speed, but I would like to run full resoloution for Keyhole and Solidworks ......

Anyone have a DVI out card of some other type that I could try out?

Any leads appreciated....

did you try lowering your refresh rate while using the DVI? this might unlock more resolutions for you. my radeon 9700 pro runs in DVI mode at 1280x1024 32bpp 75mhz without a problem. I guess it could do more also but that is my LCD's native resolution.

Yup, It seems to only support 60 hz in DVI mode. (once again, this is win 2K, I've read of people running linux who get full power out of the same card)
I also tried using a .inf file from a Sony DVI monitor that supports high res. instead of the generic plug and play monitor. But when I go deep in the control panel and click on supported modes while in DVI mode it still only comes up with 640x480 60 hz and 800 x 600 60 hz...

Thanks,

you could always convert it to analog and use it that way.

Analog? Ouch, sounds painful.
I haven't used an analog monitor for more than a few hours total in ten years. As a result, I don't get headaches anymore either. I used to get a headache after 6 hours on a top of the line Sony 21" CRT.Still it had slightly fuzzy pixels. I am so happy that I can now run a 23" in pure digital. Much better than the old days of 800x600 BW laptops being the top of the line. It's not cheap, but real comfortable for those 14 hour days of staring at the monitor.

Besides all that, I don't think the Apple cinema displays will accept analog inputs. The analog pins on the DVI cable are not there. I had to find a VGA display for setting up this new box and all I have is a projector.


Thanks for the advice!

I think I'll try a ATI Radeon 7000 64 Meg next since someone on another list is using it on a Apple display and says it works well. Also, it's cheap and I am a 914 owner at heart.

there's your problem. you need to upgrade your monitor drivers ...

the "generic plug and play monitor" only supports 640 x 480 @ 60hz

HINT: you can pretty much use ANY monitor driver you wish, if you can't find one for your specific model.
just use a driver for a good 21" or bigger monitor, that should do the trick.

Andy