Need to upgrade video card to an ATI AGP...

jtelep

Member
Feb 12, 2005
39
0
0
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.
 

IlllI

Diamond Member
Feb 12, 2002
4,927
11
81
maybe try to find an ati radeon 9800 on ebay. you could probably find one around $50 these days. it would be slightly worse than the 6600gt.
something faster than a 9800 would be an ati x800xl or xt, but more expensive(still probably under 100 though).