Best bang for the buck

[cheeb]

I'm upgrading a Matrox G200 on a BH6 with a 600 celeron @900 Don't want to spend much $ and don't want to fight compatability problems. Any suggestions.

 

[gerbz]

I just went with a radeon 32ddr in my cel566@850/BH6.
Running win98se, no problems at all. Great card.

 

[StanG]

Get Viper II from computers4sure - $64 (including S&H) - $20 rebate
-> $44!!! I also had G200 (3DMark ~950) and just replaced it with Viper II (getting ~3400 3DMark). For $44, you can't beat it!!!

 

[dfloyd]

I disagree. If your going low end you would have far less problems with a Voodoo 3k for around $50 from auctions. The Viper II is just not getting the support it needs and my old V3 3k ran everything great. Only game I noticed limitations was in Asherons Call. 16mb of ram would run out of texture memory when running above 800 x 600. Otherwise I played UT at 1024, HL & CS at 1024, Rune, Deus Ex, any D3D game. And never any compatibility problems.

If you can step up some more would be better getting a Geforce MX or if you can afford it a Radeon 32 DDR. I just got a brand new one on auction for $110 shipped. And it has some really sweet features and nice high res 32bit color speed.

 

[rudder]

I agree with dfloyd, although a voodoo3 is many generations removed by now, it still plays all my games without a hitch. I've had a geforce as well. It was a nice card but several programs like laplink would crash as well as some of my daughters pre-school games.

Stay away from the viper II, as the bug laden chip has never been fixed, even with the latest drivers.

 

[Goi]

If you wanna go cheap, the V3 can't be beat. The new V3 drivers improve the performance even more.

 

[novice]

Hate to sound like a parrot, but agree with Dfloyd and others, V3 3000 is a great budget way to go. If your budget stretches to a little over $100, then consider a Geforce 2 MX. I picked up the Creative Annihilator 2 MX, and was amazed at the visual improvement over the V3. The voodoo 3 was about as fast framerate wise, but wow, that 32 bit color!
Chuck
Hey, cheeb, what kind of cooling are you using on your Celeron 600? I am putting one together next week, and "may" want to try to overclock it

 

[audreymi]

I've been tracking a number of threads asking basically
the same question:

1. 
   which video card to buy
   what cards not to buy
   best bargain

I need good 2D and my son 3D and I
found that the MX cards are OK in resolutions up
to 1280x1024. To be sure you need to check it with
the monitor you are thinking about purchasing.
Sony monitors seem to show up all the good and bad points
of video signals at higher resolutions like 1600x1200.
The Radeon 32MB SDR seems to be the best set of compromises with
good 3D, sharp 2D and stable enough drivers.

Useful thread covering all this issues from users and upgraders
of several cards and monitors for those who consider 2D important:
<a target=new href="http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=31&amp;threadid=269838">&quot;Ok for the definitive , answer on how the geforce2 2d looks here
is my take on it&quot;</a>

 

[legion88]

cheeb wrote:

<< I'm upgrading a Matrox G200 on a BH6 with a 600 celeron @900 Don't want to spend much $ and don't want to fight compatability problems. Any suggestions. >>

You did not mention what kind of games you want to play. If you play Glide games, then the Voodoo cards are the way to go. Since you owned a Matrox G200, I assume that glide games is not one of your choices.

GeForce2 MX provides you the most bang for the buck. It is not the cheapest but it does provide the most features and the fastest performance for the money.

Let us do a quick comparison.

The Voodoo3 2000 (OEM, not Retail) can be bought for about 50 dollars. The fill rate of that card is 143 million pixels per second in single-texturing and 143 million pixels (286 &quot;texels&quot per second in single-pass dual-texturing (single-pass multi-texturing). 16-bit color.

The GeForce2 MX (Retail) can be bought for about 90 dollars. The fill rate of that card is 350 million pixels per second in single-texturing and 350 million pixels (700 &quot;texels&quot per second in single-pass dual-texturing (single-pass multi-texturing). 16-bit color.

If you look real closely, the MX is quite similar to a 175MHz TNT2 Ultra with the exception of single-pass dual-texturing. In that situation, the MX is twice as fast.

Here's the math:

Voodoo3 2000: 143/50 = 2.86
GeForce2 MX: 3.89

The MX is rated at 3.89 versus 2.86 for the V3 2K. MX is the better buy. MX is obviously not the cheapest but it provides the faster performance for the money. If you only had a PII 400Mhz, than this rating won't be too useful since in that case the CPU would be the major bottleneck. A faster card won't do you too much good unless you play a lot of games that uses a lot of polygons and supports hardware-accelerated T&amp;L. However, you have an overclocked CPU running at 900MHz. This rating is important.

In addition for most bang for the buck, the MX provides more features and more memory than the Voodoo3 products. For instance, you can play games that uses S3TC on the MX but not with the Voodoo3. Those fancy pixel shaders and all that goody-goody is not possible on the V3 at an acceptable performance--assuming it can run at all.

If you are looking for the cheapest card, the Voodoo3 2000 and the Viper II are your best option. Viper II is cheaper but problems will arise with that card.

If you are looking for the most bang for the buck, the Geforce2 MX is your best choice.

 

[Taz4158]

The Radeon VE is about to come out as well. You might want to check it out. Looks great for people on a budget.

 

[Varborta]

Viper II now 39.95
Viper II is again reclaim the best bang for the buck now. At least its very feature rich according the Anandtech, lets get to the price part
in OUTPOST.CoM you can have it for 59.95 - 20 rebate = 39.95!!!

 

[Goi]

The Viper II may be cheap, and may be faster than a V3, but drivers are quite a serious problem, as well as support. S3 has sold its graphics division, including Diamond Multimedia and its line of graphics chips/cards. Feature wise, the Viper II has a broken TnL engine, not that it matters anyway, since not many games use TnL, and the Viper II's TnL engine is probably weak even if it worked. Image quality is a concern, since I've seen screenshots showing texture corruption in Quake 3, as well as some polygon corruption/Z-buffer sorting errors in 3DMark 2000. Of course, those are during earlier reviews of the card, I don't know if the newer drivers have them fixed.

 

[sandorski]

I'm a Viper2 owner and though the card has great 2d, very nice 3d graphics, good TV out, great performance in UT and Q3, and great DVD decoding features, it is far from the ideal gaming card. Texture corruption and tweaking requirements abound.

Get a Voodoo3, plug it in, install drivers, restart, and play games. No muss, no fuss.

 

[Varborta]

See, from above person's talk its nice to have it for only 39.95 Lets compare something around its league. ViperII great for 40 dollars.

 

[StanG]

Regarding Viper II drivers - there was a new one released on 10/30 (or so), showing that there is STILL support for that chipset...