Need Video Card Recommendation...

[F3user]

Financial situation and past due homework forced me to buy a factory built system when the ide controller died on my old motherboard. I got 6 months no payments, no interest, etc. from Office Depot and that's how I got into this mess. Now to the question:

I bought a HP7965 which is a P4/1.7Ghz on an Asus P4B w/512MB RAM (upgraded to 768MB) running XP. So far so good, but they paired it with the crappiest video card Nvidia makes, the M64 TNT2. So I have a system totally bottlenecked by the video card. I installed XP Plus and the screensavers barely run. I have narrowed my choices down to the GF3 TI-200 or the Radeon 8500. I'm not worried about the price difference, but 2D is very important. The only games I ever play are the NFS series. Porsche Unlimited will install and start on this system, but the game menus are not legible, the tires are nearly square!

Thanks for any recommendations on what to put in this system?

 

[elkinm]

Radeon 8500 plain and simple. At this point there is no paint at all to go with the TI200 as the 8500 is faster, looks better, you name it.

 

[alm4rr]

ditto

 

[Semper Fi]

Hope you don't mind if i throw a question in here.

Does the Radeon 8500 do well with XP? Or, do the Radeons have good XP drivers out yet?

I see in your Rig that you are running XP elkinm, is it performing well?

I have a Viper II and support is not there for XP or 2000 for that matter.
Time for a new vid card.

 

[ed21x]

yeah, the November 14th driver really improved performance for XP, upping it's level much closer to 98/ME