what card for me?

[Willay]

Hello there!

I'm planning a system upgrade for myself in the next few weeks, going to be upgrading the motherboard,proc,graphics. I've opted for Gigabytes new nForce 2 chip based board and AMD processor but I'm not sure what to do for graphics, it must meet these requirements:

! 128MB , no less.
! Costing no more then £150
! Takes advantage of my 8x AGP port.
! Wont need to upgrade in half a years time cause games wont run with medium settings!
! Windows 2000 happy.
! Pref nvidia over ATI cause I've heard horrors about them working FreeBSD etc.

Ive lived on my Geforce 2 Ultra for too long now and feel its time to move on.

Games I play most of the time are Quake3a+mods, Half Life + mods, Battlefield 1942 + mods.

Any help advice/recomendations would be great and thanks to anyone that comments!

Cheers.

 

[titanmiller]

I think a 128mb Ti4200 8x fits your criteria. It should be good to go for the next 6 months.

 

[nick1985]

Originally posted by: titanmiller
I think a 128mb Ti4200 8x fits your criteria. It should be good to go for the next 6 months.

 

[Schadenfroh]

Originally posted by: nick1985

Originally posted by: titanmiller
I think a 128mb Ti4200 8x fits your criteria. It should be good to go for the next 6 months.

 

[Willay]

titanmiller: would that be able to handle high settings within games listed above and beeeee smoooth?

 

[Schadenfroh]

Originally posted by: Willay
titanmiller: would that be able to handle high settings within games listed above and beeeee smoooth?

my 4200 8x runs all those games at maximum detail across the board with FSAA without the hint of lag

 

[Willay]

thats great, I've found a card that uses the chipset you have recomended, GeForce 4 Ti4200-8x 128MB DDR AGP RP DVI VIVO by leadtek, and its just under £100 lovely!

 

[Kolibri]

Radeon 9700NON-PRO

 

[devers]

The Ti4200 is a good card no doubt. But for just $30-40 more you can get a Radeon 9600P which offers two main benefits:

1) Drastically improved Anti-Aliasing and Aniso Filtering. Check out the AA+AF benchmarks on most any site.

2) DirectX 9 compatibility. The 9600P is DX9 compatible, the ti4200 is not. Not a major issue, perhaps, but might be worth a few extra bucks to ya.

Also, the 9600P is a young chipset, while the GF4 is very mature. As such, it's quite possible that the 9600P has more room to grow in terms of improved performance from updated future drivers.

Note that you can also pick up a Radeon 9500 non-pro for only $10-20 more than a ti4200.