I have two bones to pick with Ati
 
1.) They have HORRIBLE support (if any at all) under *nix
 
2.) They put LOTS of garbage and trash on widnwos like Ati Control Center etc..
 
LOL
 
Also, Atis have nice bells and whistles which my system probably can't take advantage of!

But you have to remember that the lion's share of ATi's market is Windows based machines, either OEM's/System Builders and Retail

Quote:4.) Buying just a small "upgrade" card is out of the question. I had bought a GeForce 4 MX 440 thinking I am UPGRADING from a Geforce 2 MX 400. This is obviously not true. I need a good solid reliable and powerful card (see number 1 above).
A GeForce4 MX is a decent upgrade from a GeForce2 MX 400. The gf4 MX is like a Gf2 Ultra with higher clock speed.

That aside, out of the nVidia cards a FX5600 would be a good buy for your system. The FX5200 would max out before the XP2000 would. Also the new FX5700 out which deserves consideration. I think this post should satisfy all your 4 requirements: game play, Win 2k support, Linux support and Gf4 mx to FX5600 or FX5700 is a significant upgrade.

P.S. AGP 8x is virtually useless. All operations are done from the video cards local memory not AGP memory. Also benchmarks back up what I say about AGP 8x. No performance gain if you have it and no loss if you don't.

Thanx for the input. So What you are saying Is I should be looking for either an Nvidia Geforce 4 FX 5600 or Nvidia geForce 4 FX 5700 128MB AGP 4/8x ?
(note the workding: GeForce 4...)

Well technically the GeForce FX is not a GeForce 4 GPU it would have been called the GeForce 5 but I think nVidia decided on a name change for this series of GPU's

Quote:Thanx for the input. So What you are saying Is I should be looking for either an Nvidia Geforce 4 FX 5600 or Nvidia geForce 4 FX 5700 128MB AGP 4/8x ?
(note the workding: GeForce 4...)

Yep. I reckon thats the way to go if you wanna stay with nVidia.

P.S. It's just GeForce FX not GeForce 4 FX

yeeeouch! Geforce FX 5600 runs at $93, FX 5800 at $193!
 
I might have to live with my MX 440 a little longer
 
The brands are all generic. There is one called AGPTEK, one called Inno3d, and one called eVGA. I have tried evGA before for my GeForce 2.
 
Does it matter which brand I pick?

Quote:yeeeouch! Geforce FX 5600 runs at $93, FX 5800 at $193!

I might have to live with my MX 440 a little longer

The brands are all generic. There is one called AGPTEK, one called Inno3d, and one called eVGA. I have tried evGA before for my GeForce 2.

Does it matter which brand I pick?

Sometimes the cooling mechanisms are different. I would go to a site (such as newegg) where they have pictures of the cards to make sure it fits any cooling requirements you might have.

Pricewatch does have pictures of them. Here is the picture of the eVGA one.
 

 
Does it really matter which brand I get?

Quote:I have two bones to pick with Ati

1.) They have HORRIBLE support (if any at all) under *nix

2.) They put LOTS of garbage and trash on widnwos like Ati Control Center etc..

LOL

Also, Atis have nice bells and whistles which my system probably can't take advantage of!

1. Check out ATI driver page, they do have linux drivers.
URL: http://www.ati.com/support/drivers/linux...&submit.y=8

2. - You mean ATI control panel is trash? then how bout nvidia?
their newest "forceware" 50 series driver have lots of "useless" options as well.......so they're both the same deal

- actually i never find any video driver's control panel as "trash and garbage", as they provides lots of useful options to tweak video card performance

- besides you can install ati drivers by itself if you think control panel is not useful...ATI have give option to uninstall smartgart as well, as some ppl dun like it much

Quote:Quote:I have two bones to pick with Ati

1.) They have HORRIBLE support (if any at all) under *nix

2.) They put LOTS of garbage and trash on widnwos like Ati Control Center etc..

LOL

Also, Atis have nice bells and whistles which my system probably can't take advantage of!

1. Check out ATI driver page, they do have linux drivers.
URL: http://www.ati.com/support/drivers/linux...&submit.y=8

2. - You mean ATI control panel is trash? then how bout nvidia?
their newest "forceware" 50 series driver have lots of "useless" options as well.......so they're both the same deal

- actually i never find any video driver's control panel as "trash and garbage", as they provides lots of useful options to tweak video card performance

- besides you can install ati drivers by itself if you think control panel is not useful...ATI have give option to uninstall smartgart as well, as some ppl dun like it much

Those drivers look generic. THey do not look like they provide any 3D functionality. Also, they do not say WHICH cards these drivers are for.

As for the stuff that Ati/Nvidia installs, Ati (as you said) gives you the option to un install. Which means it INSTALLS it (whther u like it or not) then you have to manually remove it

I am still not convinced that radeon cards are supported under Linux. General opinion states they seem to lack good reliable support for linux. The way I look at it is if I pay hard earned cash for a video card, then I don't want a company that says we're too lazy to support Linux.


As for the tools and control panel items that you do not find to be garbage, they ug the heck out of me. I want my desktop nice and clean, with nothing running in the background or in my system tray, consuming resources, while providing functionality I rarely ever need. The way I see it is, WHEN i do need the functionality of these annoying programs, I can install them and use them form the Windows control panel manually.



That's just my 2 cents

Well if you check out ATI drivers download section, you'll see that you can download the windows drivers as on package, or individual components (driver, control panel). And MMC and dvd driver is seprate component as well.
URL: http://www.ati.com/support/drivers/winxp...amp;submit.y=10
 
ATI have given user to intall driver and control panel seprately, nvidia don't even give you that option. The nvidia's control panel is bundled with the driver so u can't install it seprately. So if you think that the control panel is taking resource (which doesn't take that much, maybe a few mb)
you can install drivers only.
 
The linux drivers are for all radeon series, (8500/9000/9100/9200/9500/9600/9800), and they're fully optimized for 2D/3D functionality like nvidia does
URL: http://www.ati.com/support/faq/linux.html
 
But they don't have drivers for IA64 and AMD64 available yet, which you will not likely to use these ones. ATI will have support for these CPUs available later.
 
Same as Nvidia, ATI provided one driver for Radeon family, and Nvidia for Geforce family. So ATI's inferior driver support (windows, linux) is a thing in the past. Starting from the catalyst drivers, they provided full range support for full windows and linux family.
 
My first and second video card is nvidia (TNT, Geforce2) and i like them more then ATI by then. But I switch to ATI because of Geforce FX's disappointing performance, and their attitude (they deliberately cheat in benchmark/games, which i know ppl would say ATI cheats as well, but the problem is that they say that even by cutting corners it's still "fine". And the margin is too excessive too (when Madonion released 3dmark 01/03 patch for example, nvidia's performance dropped drastically (more then 20%) but ATI's is only like 1 or 2 percent or sth, which is very minor in comparison). And even worse is that their responded by releasing new driver versions to "re-enable the optimizations" which say that they're really just ignore what the customer really wanted (true performance). And ATI's response is that they'll turn off the optimization with the next driver release(even though is nth compare to nvidia). So this kinda of attitude it causes me to loose confidence with Nvidia.

Quote:
But I switch to ATI because of Geforce FX's disappointing performance


I did not relize FX had such bad ratings. Also I did not check the driver thingy, so i stand corrected.,

Ok, so lets say I want to get a Radeon, which card should I get that meetts ALL of requirements 1, 2 ,3 and 4 (mentioned earlier)?

Hey Guys, Check this link out
 
256MB 9600
 
This is a REALLY good price for a 256 MB card. What do u guys think?
 

Sapphire appears to be the biggest ATi partner ATM. We sell a lot of Powered by ATi cards in the shop, most are Sapphire branded. Then we get the occasional client wanting the retail boxed Built by ATi with all the goodies. Well that depends on which model you get. The desktop retail boxed versions Built by ATi do have extra's like games and such, however their Workstation cards, the Fire GL cards, only come with the DVI2VGA adapters and the drivers disk. This insanely huge box full of nothing basically
 
Here's where things in the states get ludicrus, I'd rather have less fluff and a plain white/brown box, or even just the anti-static bad, along with the drivers disk and the item then these fancy retail boxes ;(

Yes but what do u think of the card above (there is a link to it) ?

Sorry, I neglected to comment on your question there
 
Well on this model I can't say but if it's like any of there other Radeon models then I'd say it's a good buy. I've installed 100's of these cards now in various machine builds and have had little problems with them. They work well with the supplied drivers disk and the OEM Radeon drivers from ATi's site

Hmmm I C. I have heard it has an older GPU. iI still can't figure out which is the best card my system can take advantage of

Yeah, thats right. TI4200 give decent speeds in pre-DX9, and even some DX9 games; save those heavily optmised for DX9 titles.
 
As for a GF4 card on this game, try avoid running the game in bilinear filtering mode, cos it shows some instability in doing so, stay with the trilinear filtering.

HI All,
 
Can anyone help me with this. I found a decent deal on a 9600 SE. Here is the link
 
Radeon 9600 SE 128 MB
 
Is this card any good?
 
Thanx