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best budget 2D vcard

G

gfx04

Junior Member
what's the best budget 2D vcard (under $140), that also has 3D performance that can be used in games (not Quake or Unreal type stuff). Radeon seems king of 3D cards but how well does it (9100pro and 9500 series mainly) compare to leading 2D cards? Looking for 128mb ddr.
 
matrox card. not sure which would fit into that budjet, what am i saying matrox does not make a card that has 128mb for less than 140, maybe a geoforce4200, i have one and the 2d is excellent. or maybe a 8500 the 2d on it is good also.
 
What games exactly? CompUSA will have Visiontek Radeon 9100 128MB PCI/AGP on sale tomorrow for $80 after a $20 MIR; that card will be fairly fast, in between a GF3 and GF4, and should have very good 2D quality and DVD playback.

Or you can wait for a regular Radeon 9600 to become available. Only the 9600 Pro is for sale now, and that's a little out of your price range ($177), though it is much faster than the 9100.
 
2D desktop quality from best to worst:
Matrox, ATI, nVidia. nVidia has the worst track record for 2D. Powercolor has been bad from time to time as well.
If 2D is your main concern and you want some decent gaming, go ATI Retail and don't look back. nVidia has improved on average, but if you go ATI retail you're 100% certain to get sharp 2D quality - something you might or might not get with an nVidia card.

nVidia fanatics (word chosen on purpose) don't get all huffy... you know that nVidia has a bad track record for 2D - or at least the MFRs of nVidia cards did anyways. Most cards from the GF4 series finally showed marked improvement, but you're still *safer* with ATI on this one.

If you're not a big gamer, the Matrox P650 card is about your price range but won't perform better than a Radeon 8500LE or so... I wouldn't go that route if you're serious about gaming - it's hard to justify the price tag when you can get an ATI card for much less and it'll STILL do multi-monitors. (Matrox is still king of 2D and multi-monitor. If you didn't say "gaming" I'd recommend Matrox and nothing else.)

If you insist on going nVidia, be sure to buy from a store with a liberal return policy should it not be quality enough for you.

That's my two bits. 🙂
 
I myself don?t have direct comparisons but I have read several posts on hardware forums that say the latest ATI cards (9000up series) have 2D equal to the Matrox cards.
 

I would suggest to go with those Build By ATI video card if you really have concern about
2D image quality. If you go with Nvidia chip based video card, make sure purchase famous brand,
such as Leadtek, ELSA, MSI and ASUS. Of course, that would be more expensive than those
"Build By ATI" card within same performance range.

 
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