By Anonymous on Wednesday, November 21, 2001 - 04:32 pm:
Has anyone recently purchased this card? I've been looking to upgrade from my dated (very) Voodoo 3 16 meg card and this ATI puppy is tempting. Any impressions?
By Jeff Atwood (Wumpus) on Wednesday, November 21, 2001 - 04:41 pm:
ATI has an abysmal reptuation for drivers, particularly in NT/XP.
They also take a *lot* of 3D quality shortcuts that many websites still don't grasp (trilinear and anisotropic are mutually exclusive, oddball MIP level calculations, forced LOD shifting, etc).
I personally do not recommend the ATI Radeon series. The nVidia GeForce3 Ti 200 64mb is around $150-$190 and when overclocked slightly performs the same as the 8500 in most games.
By Alan Au (Itsatrap) on Wednesday, November 21, 2001 - 04:54 pm:
FYI, there are reports of an advertised $99 price point on a GeForce3 Ti 200 card in the Best Buy after-Thanksgiving flyer.
- Alan
By Brad Grenz on Wednesday, November 21, 2001 - 07:24 pm:
2 $50 rebates. One mailed one instant. I figured it was a typo they wouldn't honor, but perhaps not.
By Dave Long on Wednesday, November 21, 2001 - 10:00 pm:
No, that's for real. I got my BB flier tonight.
--Dave
By Rob_Merritt on Thursday, November 22, 2001 - 12:06 am:
I have a Radeon AIW 32 meg DDR and it runs great in XP and looks great too.
By Anonymous on Thursday, November 22, 2001 - 07:05 am:
I guess the new Radeon chips might be overkill for my setup. Or the Geforce Ti200, for that matter. I have a P3 550 Mhz, with newly installed RAM bringing my total up to 256 megs PC100 SDRAM. Since I'm not going to be able to do bettter than PC100 SDRAM, and I'm running with a fairly old processor on win98, my assumption is that, although possible, it won't be worth going past 256 RAM in upgrades.
As for my graphics card, I want to get rid of this old Voodoo 3 3000 and get something to tide me over until I get a new system altogether. Any suggestions? Is it worth getting a fast/new card or will it go underutilized considering my old mboard and P3 550 (god, that seemed so fast in 99)? I was thinking I might be better off with a Geforce 2 MX or some shit like that. What do you guys think? Thanks for you comments, btw...
By Michael Murphy (Murph) on Thursday, November 22, 2001 - 07:25 am:
I'm in much the same boat, and here's my thinking...
Either go for a GeForce 2 Pro ($88) -- nice 64MB graphics card that's a decent step up, but still able to be utilized with your current setup, and can be transferred to a new system, and not put you far behind, or go ahead and hit Best Buy tomorrow and get the $99 GeForce 3, which won't be put to best use now (but won't hurt much, either), but you'll already have it once you upgrade your set.
Assuming you can get to Best Buy Friday, seems like a no-brainer...Why spend $88 on an inferior card when you can go top-of-the-line for $99? Considering a GeForce 2 MX is like $55, why even bother with it?
By Jeff Atwood (Wumpus) on Thursday, November 22, 2001 - 03:10 pm:
Yes-- GeForce 2 Pro. I don't recommend the MX, there's just no good reason to downgrade to SDR memory with these prices.
OTOH Murph's advice is good. You can always carry the video card over to your new system. This is particularly true of the GeForce3. Heck, I had an Athlon 1.4 / PC133 and my 3dmark score went up by nearly 45% when I upgraded to an Athlon 1.7 / PC266. Same video card, though..
