Video Card Question

[necrov]

Hi,

Next week iŽll buy a Athlon 900.

The dude that i have got is which Video Card.

My selection is between a Voodoo 5 or a GeForce 2MX.

Could you help for this selection, pliz?

Thanks in advance.

[TheWobble]

A few weeks ago i bought BOTH with the intention of taking the one i didnt like back,
I bought a V5 5500 and GeForce2 GTS, while the GeForce gave me a little better framerate its FSAA was no nearly as good as the voodoo5 5500's
so basically if you want to run at SUPER high res without FSAA the geforce is good if you want to run at say 1280x1024 with 2x fSAA (wich looks SWEET) go with the V5, I notice you said the MX version of the Geforce, i didnt test that one but I would venture to guess the V5 will outperform it by quite a degree on all levels ESPECALLY FSAA.  plus if your monitor doesent support a 3d res of 1600x1200 or higher the geforce's high res performance over the V5 will be negated because at 1280x1024, theyare at about par with eachother..all in all I would get the V5 5500 its cheap, its a solide performer on all fronts, and its FSAA is better than the GeForce's

[bloom25]

There are a couple things I should mention here.  The V5 will not fit in all cases, because it is so long.  There are other issues as well:  On the Asus A7V, one of the most popular Athlon boards, there is a problem plugging in the IDE cable with a V5 5500.  The card is so long you have to cut the plastic top off the IDE ribbon to make it fit.

Also, the Geforce 2 GTS is much faster than the MX.  I don't imagine even the GTS costing more than the V5.

Last, but definately not least, 3DFx was purchased by Nvidia.  This means that driver updates will likely not be available for long.  If you intend on keeping the card for long this may become a problem.  In addtion the V5 is super power hungry, you better have a 300W power supply.  (Same thing goes for the GeForce.)

As for which card is better, it's been said many times.  The GeForce will be faster (even the MX in many cases), the V5 will look better.  There is not really any downside to either card, but I will say getting a GeForce card happy in a VIA chipset board (which 90% of current Athlon Thunderbirds are), can be kind of tricky.



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bloom25
THUNDERBIRDS

[DB603]

S!

 GeForce2 is a good choice.I have ATI Radeon 64Mb now and it runs smoothly and without bigger hickups.Only downside is a bit immature drivers for it that can cause some irritating "DDhelp.exe has caused blah blah" and the machine freezes.But 95% of the time runs fine.

DB603

[prz]

I got a GTS and I would plunck the $$s down for it again. I have it running in a KT7RAID without problems (well, blue streaks fixed by obscure tweaking tool, read some earlier thread of mine). I had GeoForce2 before and the improvement was worth the money, went with higher frame-rates one resolution notch up (to 1280x1024) and it makes a big difference. Now I can spot flak on ground from far. Never tried the V5 thing, I got burned over years with to many "our hardware is better and then oops we went out of business". Latest examples SyQuest drive, recently died on me and hell of data with it. Had I bought Jazz I'd be in less trouble.

[Frosty1]

Get a full blown Geforce 2. You can get one for less than $200 now and besides the Voodoo 5 isn't supported anymore. 3x3 or 4x4 FSAA on the Geforce 2 at 1280x1024 is stunning! Much faster and unless you're looking at your screen with a telescope you won't really notice the difference in the FSAA between the GF2 and V5. V5 FSAA shines in still images, not when you have arseloads of moving crap on your screen.  

Hope my extremely profession opinion helps you in this very important buying decision.  

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===>Frosty
====>Exposure2k.com
=====>Frosty@exposure2k.com