I would like your opinion--"Should my TNT2 vid card go?"

[IMeek]

I currently have a Nvidia TNT2 32 mb video card installed in my PIII 733 computer (w/256 RAM). I also have a ATI TV Wonder VE card installed. I need several questions addressed.

A) Should I upgrade my vid card? And if so, what should I upgrade it to (I am of the budget minded (~$100 or less)

or/and

B) Should I keep the current vid card and upgrade my processor to PIII 1000


I play a few games here and there Q3 mainly, but I've also been capturing my 8 mm videos to my computer and burning them to VCD. Would a new vid card make the image quality better

Your advice is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

IMeek

 

[spanner]

If quake 3 is running well enough then don't bother. I doubt video cards have much impact on movie encoding, that is mostly based on the tuner quality and the encoder. You may want a new video card to improve 2d-quality, if so avoid sub $100 geforce cards, maybe a kyroII(will give gaming a pretty big kick in performance) or a matrox card. Same with upgrading the CPU, 733-1000 is not a big gain especially with ram being the bottleneck so unless your computer feels sluggish or you need faster movie encoding then don't bother.

 

[Mike99C5]

I have a similar setup to yours...PIII 800, 256MB...I used to have a TNT2 but recently upgraded to a Gainward GF3 Ti200 GS450. The difference is simply amazing. A lot better 2D quality and 3D gaming is off the charts. My frame rates more than doubled in RTCW and Ghost Recon. I can also now run 32bit textures whereas before I could not. The GF4 is coming out soon so I expect the Ti200 cards will drop to around $100 at that time. I got mine from newegg.com for $165 shipped 2 months ago. If you do go with a Ti200 then Gainward is the best overclocker. Amazing performance.

 

[Heretik]

Yeah, if your current card is meeting all your needs and you have no problems with it, you probably don't need to bother with an upgrade. My kids computer had been running a TNT2 Ultra for years (all they play is Frogger and other kids games) but lately have "expressed" a "desire" to play some of the same games I play, so I upgraded the kids machine to a Visiontek Xtasy 5632 (the famed $49 card from Newegg). Runs everything great, including Return to Castle Wolfenstein......so if you REALLY feel the need to upgrade and want to do it as cheap as possible, you can't go wrong with that particular card.

 

[IMeek]

Thanks for the input. I think I might pick up the Xtasy card from Newegg. I've decided (with the ok from my wife) to build a new computer. So I could use the TNT2 as a first card as I work out the bugs. Thanks again, IMeek