thoughts on a BULK Visiontek GF3 ti200 for $85?

[duuuma]

it's either a Visiontek gf3 ti200 (~$85 off pricewatch) or a ATI R8500 LE 64mb from newegg ($95)

help me out please?

 

[SpHeRe31459]

heh, just finshed replying to your other thread about the Radeon.

I figured I would just drop my 2 cents on the subject for ya.

I have a GF3 Ti200 and am totaly happy with it.

If you check out anandtech's new articles on how new video cards do with UT2k3,
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1647
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1650
you will see that a Radeon 8500LE is a better choice for the future as ATI now has the 8500 family drivers tweaked to a ~GF3 Ti500 level of performance.

If you can bear with ATI still cleaning up a little bit on their drivers (but all signs to point to a major recovery in ATI's drivers reputation) I would go for an 8500 based video card in a second.
If you decied to go with the 8500 I would check out Rage 3D for a nice ATI user site.
I would also suggest that you consider using the Omega/Plutonium drivers (http://www.omegacorner.com/ati.htm) that are mixed to provide the best drivers possible, as ATI still needs a 3rd party to really tweak their drivers, unlike NVIDIA which users stopped having to combine their drivers versions quite sometime ago. Don't let this scare ya off though as the ATI offical and offical beta drivers are doing just fine as well.

Hope this helps ya!

SpHeRe