Diamond speedstar A90 16m vs ATI Rage pro 8m

[TOOCOOL]

any thoughts on this would be helpfull is it worth the bother of swapping the ATI card for the Diamond.
The cpu is a k62-550

thanx in advance

 

[ViRGE]

Stick with the ATI. The Speedstar is a Savage 4 I belive, so it's a tad slower as I remember it, and has no driver support.

 

[vss1980]

I would have to disagree there. The Savage4 is a much faster chip boasting a higher fill-rate, more memory, AGP 4x and better features such as DXTC (Texture compression) and the fact that its 16-bit differing (where you will be spending most of your time in 3D) is noticably better than that of the ATI, although driver support for the Savage will be a problem after Win2k passes by, the ATI drivers for the Rage Pro series are far from perfect.

If you already have the cards, the Savage4 is the faster card (the original Savage3D performed in the same area as the ATI Rage Pro - the Savage4 performs closer to the Rage 128 chip), and should give a noticable speed increase in Direct3D games. You dont have much to loose to just try it.

However, I would not go out of my way to buy the Savage4 card, especially as you can get some TNT2 Ultra's for around $50 which offer a lot more performance.

If you are thinking of buying the card I recommend you not bother and use the limited budget you were gonna use to buy that, to buy a 2nd hand TNT2 or something - much better value for money that way.

 

[Viztech]

Hmmm Is there still any issues with TNT cards and (I am going to assume) the VIA chipset that you have? For that reason, I went with a VooDoo 3 3000 on my VIA/k6-2 450 that I built a year and a half ago. I have since ditched the K6 machine and have upgraded with Celerons since, but we are still happy with the VooDoo 3 card. It is MUCH better than the Rage Pro 4 mb that we had prior.

Another consideration is that many of the newer AGP video cards take more power than the mobos are able to supply. The V3 3000 is near, but not over the edge in this regard.

viz