Good 2D cards other than (cheaper than) Matrox?

[stultus]

My lab's dual P3-600 machine has been dead for about a year. It had some matrox flavored card, but now the BIOS is giving a video card error code (and following that is a constant beeping that may be nothing or may be "bad ram"). So, time to buy a new card. I see the Matrox cards start at $85 on newegg.com. This seems a little steep in the event there's more problems with this dead system. Can anyone recommend a good 2D card?

This machine was running Redhat linux, doing "heavy calculations" in a biochemistry lab. (I just joined the lab.)

 

[Schadenfroh]

voodoo3

In terms of 2D quality, the Voodoo3 is definitely top-notch, almost on level with that of the Matrox G200, and depending on your eyes in particular, you may not be able to notice any difference between the 2D quality on a Voodoo3 and on a Millennium G200. 3dfx definitely did a good job with making sure that the 2D quality of the Voodoo3 was up to par with the expectations of the market.