Whats the best vid card???

PJ Hunt

OK guys..

I'm upgrading from a 16 Meg Voodoo Banshee (which works brill for me..musta been lucky eh?)

So in ye'r educated view...whats the dogs ######## around these days for £150?

Or is the dog available for £150?

I dunno....

Thanks in advance..

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‡PJ‡

Karla

I'm not up on Graphics cards at the moment but here's my 0.02p anyhoo:

Since the GeForce 2 is out now you'd prolly pick up a GeForce 256 for around £150 maybe less if you're lucky and I know that that's a damn fine card.

I was shopping for a cheap card the other day and found that it's pretty hard to find them in shops. You're best bet is prolly a second hand card or else asking your buddies to ask around.

I've got a TNT2 which I think is the dogs ###### and you'd be able to pick up one of those for about £140.

Take a peek at the For Sale board every so often too, there might be something there. You never know.

PJ Hunt

Thanks....

I've seen a TNT in the shops for 139 but I didnt see if its a 2 or not...I know its 32 Mb..thats probly the first one id say..

BTW ...Must mail u back about that other stuff....

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‡PJ‡

Karla

Yah it's the TNT2 alright. That might come down in price too fairly soon as Nvidia are bringing out the Quadro's (don't know when)

_CreeD_

The Quadro is already out, it was only produced by ELSA.
They're working on the Quadro-II.
You should be able to get a TNT-2 much cheaper than 140 if you look around. But I'd go with the Geforce if I were you.

If you go to anandtech.com and do a search over the last 2 weeks there was an article on how to hack a standard Geforce into a Quadro (INvolved shorting some contacts in the board but was not that complicated).It nearly doubled the CAD scores.

Jelvon

I got a tnt-2 for 95 quid from www.euro2000.ie

Yossarian

best vid card at the moment would be the GeForce 2 64MB . The Quadro is basically a CAD card .
Last time i looked at prices GeForce2's were seling for arounmd the 200 quid mark. If your looking at TNT2 go with the TNT2 Ultra
its the faster version of it.

Stephen.

Blitzkrieger

I thought the best card at the moment was the VooDoo 5 6000

Tho with the latest two generation of cards isn't there a lack of any game that can take full advantage of them? The sad thing is that instead of comparing top-end performace we have to compare middle-of-the-road performance

Hecate

ummm, looking at performance comparisons; the V5 6000 and the GF2 are on a par with each other, but the voodoo 5 is by no means the best, hardware fsaa being one of the few things to recommend it...and the T-buffer is just a marketing buzzword

_CreeD_

Actually the Voodoo 6000 should kick the $hit out of a Geforce2. Why?
Fillrate-wise
Geforce 2 = 800Mpixels/s, 1600Mtexels/s
V6000 = 1300Mpixels/s 1300Mtexels/s

So the Geforce2 has a higher multitexture fill rate, but a lower actual Pixel rate.
The real clincher is the memory bandwidth.
The average Geforce2 has 5.2Gb/s, which is nowhere near enough to handle the amount it's core can do, hence the relatively small (~20% average) performance increase over a Geforce1.
The Vooodoo6000 has 12Gb/s, so it can actually handle it's core fill rate.

This is all moot since the V6 hasn't appeared, and while 3dfx keep saying it'll be out in the summer, they seem to forget this is the last month of it and they dont even have preview boards out yet.
Maybe they meant australian summer?.....


The best at the moment is the Gainward Geforce 2, as it comes clocked at 400Mhz ram (as opposed to 333Mhz of a std. board) This gives it ~6.4Gb/s, which has shown about a 10-20% improvement again over other Geforce2 cards.

Kali

pity the v6000 is still going to perform terrible in opengl games though.

about the gainward geforce 2.. thats the one tomshardware were given..
they had been given a test card with 5ns DDR SDRAM (which is very overclockable up to 472 the managed) and as such everyone thinks its **** fast but the actual retail cards come with 6ns DDR... which will only ramp up to 420.
dont go expecting the 10-20% performance increase from it cos your not going to get it.

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http://www.filmsoc.com

Chubby

Originally posted by _CreeD_:
Actually the Voodoo 6000 should kick the $hit out of a Geforce2. Why?

Yeah, the Voodoo5 6000 should kick the crap out of a GeForce2 but that's hardly a fair comparison. The v5 6000 has more processors on board and is going to retial at about $600, about 500-600 quid. It's like comparing a 1gz p3 to a 700mhz athlon. The p3 is gonna kick the crap out of it. Don't you worry about the price difference.

And the guy did not ask for the best card money can buy. The best card for about £150. I'd say that's the GeForce DDR. Don't bother with the SDR version, the price difference should be very small and DDR performs a lot better in high res because it has more memory bandwidth. Should be able to get this for about 170-180 pounds. I've seen the creative ddr oem version on www.aria.co.uk for 118 sterling excluding vat.