Help Choosing a Video Card

[JeffDogg1979]

I got away from gaming during my college years and I think it's time to upgrade to a decent video card. I've currently got a Diamond Viper V550 16mb TNT video card. Here's my current setup(it really doesn't pertain to the question, but gives you an idea of how old/new other components are):

Dual p2 400mhz
16mb TNT card
80gig total IDE HD
40gig total SCSI HD
400gig Optical Storage
8x Plextor SCSI CDR
2nd gen. Creative Labs DVD drive
Ensoniq PCI 128 Sound Card

Current Running Os(es): Running Win98se/Windows NT 4.0 w/SP6a (this is fine for games like Half-Life, Unreal Tournament, and Diablo 2 which is all I've played recently)

Projected Running OS(es): I'm currently formatting and I'll be Dual booting Win98se/Win2k Pro.

So... Now you have a pretty good idea what I'm running, and since I'll try and do most my gaming in Win2k, my Dual Chips will handle pretty much any game out there. I currently run Unreal Tournament in 1280x1024 with no noticable slow-down in Windows NT(of course that's software mode and Unreal Tournament supports multi-thread).

I've tried looking for a definitive answer as to which video card to get, but I've come up with nothing. I want to be able to play games that will come out at least for another 1-2 years without my frame rate dropping through the floor and ideally I'd like a card that will have active driver support for at least another 1-2 years. I'd like to also note that I'm not made of money so a Geforce 3 is out of the question. So now I ask you, good people of the AnandTech forums, do I go Radeon? Kyro 2? Some flavor of Geforce 2? A 512k Trident VGA card ?

Thanks in advance for any assistance offered.

 

[JeffDogg1979]

Forgot to mention... I have 2 gigs of RAM in my box.

 

[jobberd]

if you're looking for the best bang-to-buck ratio, go for the Radeon LE. Its very fast for its price. However, along the road it will probably not play games the way you would want them to. In that case, go for a Geforce2 pro or Kyro2. Both have strong lasting power.
ps: what in the world are you using a computer with that much stuff in it for?!

 

[Archknight]

Radeon LE for `$70 over newegg.com with a little registry hack and overclocking it will perform like the normal Radeon. Anandtech had an article on it too. For ~$110, the Kyro2 either Inno3d or Hercules is a good choice, offer better performance in games in most cases.

Your rig was a server right?

 

[BFG10K]

I'd suggest a GF2 GTS or pay a bit for a 64 MB GF2 Pro. Both cards are excellent.