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View Full Version : What's a decent gaming video card?


Cornbread
03-27-2002, 10:09 AM
I think I bought the wrong video card for games. I got the Radeon VE with dual monitor support, and it's a 32mb job, but I'm thinking it's not set up for games.

Is the 3D accelerator important to gaming? I want to run Mechwarrior 4 and that's it..

I've heard the Geforce chip isn't bad, but I'd like to hear it from a gamer.

BigBlue66
03-27-2002, 10:38 AM
The Radeon should do you fine for most things. However, the GeForce series of vid cards have things that ATI doesn't.

I just bought an Abit Siluro GeForce3 Ti 200 AGP 64mb DDR SDRAM that I am gradually overclocking to get the best performance.

If you have the money, go for a GeForce4 Ti 4600 which is the cadillac of the GeForce video cards right now, but it's expensive. If money is tight, go for the GF3 Ti 200 or GF3 Ti 500 series of cards and overclock them. Make sure you add additional cooling if you overclock. I use a card cooler besides the active heatsink on the GPU of the card.

Cheers

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"After the wedding, we all went up to the conception room and had a big time up there"
-------- Tommy Smothers

Cornbread
03-27-2002, 10:56 AM
Cool. I saw that the 4600 was $252 on pricewatch, but I'm too impoverished right now. The 200 is 64MB DDR as well and only costs $121 + S&H.

I'm not really sure if the issues I encountered while running MW4 were video related. I'd get booted out of MW4 with an error message to the desktop, but it only locked the computer up once. It was pretty much booting me out every time I played it, depending on how fast I ran through the menus.

BigBlue66
03-27-2002, 06:13 PM
Ahh, I see. Hmmmmm.

Could very well be a compatibility problem with your video card and/or DirectX.

Run DXDIAG and report back the results.

------------------
This space reserved for highly intelligent observations and witty remarks.

"After the wedding, we all went up to the conception room and had a big time up there"
-------- Tommy Smothers

Cornbread
03-27-2002, 08:20 PM
I'd report back the results, but that POS computer currently won't boot up without having to reboot with a registry access problem. It's going in circles right now.

"Windows encountered an error accessing the system registry

Your machine will need to be restarted to repair the problem"

not to mention every time it repairs the registry I lose my video drivers and the network card is automatically reinstalled.

around in circles I go