OK, somewhat of a problem so I am requesting some advice. I have a Hitachi 21" CRT that I would like to use instead of this crappy 17" Sony however the problem is that I bought the Hitachi used and whenever I try to run it using my current NVidia 6600GT it works for about 5 or 10 minutes and then the screen goes blank and I get this strange message from the monitor say "INVALID SCAN FREQ". Doing a little bit of investigation work I have discovered that the monitor seems to work fine with 2 other ATI-type cards (one from a laptop using an ATI Radeon mobile 9000 and one from another system which is running an Xpert@Play 98/Diamond Monster Voodoo II). So for whatever reason this monitor seems to "play nice" with ATI boards. The problem is that I need it to be an AGP card right now because when I upgrade to PCIx I want it to be a decent upgrade and don't have the $600+ it's going to cost in order to do that so I figured maybe I can get another year or so out of my current system then go with the upgrade that will work. The current system is AGP. I have been looking at the ATI boards on PriceWatch and it looks like they're having some really good deals on the Radeon X1600 AGP 512MB cards (like around $130 or so). I did look into buying a new monitor instead but there's not much out there that looks as good as a high-end CRT for the same price as the video card upgrade.
If anyone has any suggestions about which way to go and what the best performance/cost point there is on a current ATI card that will do as well as my 6600GT I would really appreciate some feedback.
Thanks.
If anyone has any suggestions about which way to go and what the best performance/cost point there is on a current ATI card that will do as well as my 6600GT I would really appreciate some feedback.
Thanks.