Alrighty, I'm finally going to upgrade from my geforce 2! I'm not sure what to buy though.. I'm looking to spend around $130-$200 dollars I've only got 1 AGP slot on my mobo. Thanks for help in advance

your motherboard is gimp with only 1 agp slot

Honestly if I was you I would save up another 100 or 200 bucks and just get a pimped out 256 meg geforce or 9800 pro. The reason being is that for 130-200 bucks you might get a little bit better performance, but if you plan on playing some of the new games coming out (Doom 3), or whatever... then you need a fat card. But if you don't care about the first person shooters than grab a 128 meg card, 9800 pro or geforce, they still run all my games at 1600x1200 with a decent fps. Course, if I want a new fat card I'll just go buy one anyways but for your price range I'd just pick up a 128 meg 9800 or geforce.

I also would go for a Radeon 9800 pro or Radeon 9800 regular. Don't go for the 256meg version, it is a waste of money for what you get, the 256 meg brought around a 1-2% speed bump at best, not worth it. I would also stay away from the 9800 se edition(Just think Shitty-Edition when you see it). They are nothing but rebranded 9500's and 9600's, unworthy of the mighty 9800 label.
You also might want to consider if you have a cpu that is able to properly feed your beast of a card.
Personally I would stay away from the new Geforce cards that came out. Everything after geforce 4 from Nvidia has been unable to match its ATI counterpart, especially in the high-end. There have also been reports of severe DX9 problems in all current Nvidia DX9 cards (NV30, NV35, etc.). So much so that new DX9 games coming down the pipe(like farcry) are reverting to old, lower quality video modes by default. Heres a few links of people hitting the problem if you were interested:
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=17823&goto=nextnewest
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=64f22c8a6875ac5850b7d1b19a13a654&t=26873
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NTk5LDM=
http://forums.omf.com/postlist.php?Cat=&Board=omfbg_support

There have been rumors that the dx9 problems will be fixed in NV40, but they are not out yet, supposedly they are being released on April 14th. Until then I would stay away from DX9 cards from Nvidia.

Thanks for the info guys. Should I wait for the new Nvidia card or should I go wit the9800?

$130-$200 will get you a really nice card.

I got a GF4 Ti4200 3.6ns Gainward/Cardexpert "Golden Sample" (this means it's guaranteed to overclock well) for $71 refurb'd from newegg. I have it at 300/620 and I'm able to run all the newest games fine.

Anyway, here's some 9800's < $200

http://www.newegg.com/app/ListProduct.asp?DEPA=&type=Refurbish&submit=list&catalog=48&description=&page=2

To answer your question: I'd go with ATI unless you find a REALLY good price on an nVidia card. Half-Life 2 seems to run much better on ATI cards.

thats not really that true, they are using all the cards at their default settings for the most part, you can tweak both cards to play different games well. Nvidia is good for doom3 i think, ati is half life engine-ish. It depends, both can perform well for basic gaming though.

i bought my own comp like 3 years ago, i got a 64mb geforce card for like 600 dollars, what a rip off.

I would recommend you stay away from ATI and go with Nvidia. I baught the 9800 Pro 7 months ago and its giving me problems where it will not send signal to my monitor 1/5 I boot up my computer. I return it and got a replacement and it sitll does it once in a while.

That was a 9700 Pro and not a 9800 Pro

quote:

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Originally posted by kublikhan
I would also stay away from the 9800 se edition(Just think Shitty-Edition when you see it). They are nothing but rebranded 9500's and 9600's, unworthy of the mighty 9800 label.

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To Taft:
It's not exactly that you were wrong with the 9x00 assumption of the chipset numbers, more like ATI was doing something sneaky. People on a budget looking for the best will see "kewl, a 9800 at a cheap price. I don't know what the hell se is but for the price i'll take it!" ATI is not alone in doing this. Nvidia did this with the geforce 4mx, which was really an overclocked geforce 2, truly unworthy of the mighty geforce 4 label. Perhaps "shitty edition" was too strong as the 9500's and 9600's are still decent cards(I have a 9500 myself), I just don't like companies trying to dupe consumers. If you are looking to see roughly how fast the 9800 se really is, check out the benchmarks here:
http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/20031229/vga-charts-03.html#unreal_tournament_2003

To kindbud:
Your statement was a bit vauge but let me just reiterate that the NVidia cards I mentioned only have a problem in DX9, not OpenGL or DX8. Doom3 is OpenGL not DirectX 9. There are very few DX9 games on the market today. If you want to see the problem I was describing first hand try downloading the farcry demo and check out the default settings on a Radeon 9600 compared to a Geforce FX5900.

To esmage: I would go for a 9800. newegg.com has a regular 9800 for $173 and a 9800pro for $209. You might be able to find it a bit cheaper if you shop around.

To WarIINEwbie: Are you certain your video card is causing this problem? Did you try a newer Nvidia card and see if the problem goes away? Can you still hear your system booting up when you there is no video? If your system is not booting up, it sounds more like a motherboard/bios/power supply problem than a video card problem. The newer Radeon & Geforce cards are very power hungry. Many system instability issues can actually be traced to inadequate power. You should check to see if your power supply is on ATI's approved power supply list. If not you might try picking up one of the Antec TruPower line of power supplies. Most power supplies list only peak power output and not continuous power output.

Yes...

I am pretty sure it's the video card. My best friend have a g-force 4 card which i borrow to test out my system hoping it would be the motherboard cuz the motherboard is alot cheaper at the time but his card works fine. We switch cards for a week and his computer was having the same problem as mine. We both have the Abit KD-7 motherboard. Maybe its the combination of the Abit KD-7 motherboard and the 9700 pro. I myself have not try that video card on any other broad.

What kind of power supplies you guys running?

Hey War, not that this is any help, but here's some information from my own experiences. I had a NIC card that was incompatible with an ABIT mainboard and there was also a wide spread issue a long time ago with people having to hit reset several times to get there ABIT mainboard systems to boot up with most (if not all) GeForce 2 PRO line of video cards.

ABIT makes good boards but sometimes they seem to have incompatibilities with lots of things. The problems are weird like the one you are having. The NIC/ABIT problem was with Netgear cards not letting you to a "hot" reset/restart from within the operating system. You could boot up every time but never restart from the restart option inside the OS.

Well here are the only things I can suggest to try:

1.Make sure the cooling setup on the video card is firm and secure. If the problem's arising after your PC has been off for a while and it's basically cool, that's prob not the issue.

2.Check to see if there is an available BIOS update for the video card and for your mainboard.

3.Make sure you have the latest chipset drivers for your mainboard and the for your video card. You may even want to check for an updated stand alone AGP driver for your board... but I'm not sure if nvidia does that...VIA does. Kublikan, does his board use a VIA or NF2? I don't know off the top of my head...

4.Try different video settings in your BIOS War. I resolved some texture flickering in certain games on my ABIT board by setting a lower AGP spec. I went from 4x to 2x with no performance hit. You probably have better stuff and maybe an 8x AGP card.

5.Finally keep checking here because it looks like guys like Kublikan are doing a good job trying to help you.

As far as good prices for cards, I've not had my eye on the market of late, but I hear the 9800 Pro and the nv5900 and 5900XTs are a decent deal for higher end cards these days. Keep in mind new ATI and nV cards are right around the corner. Plus nV just released new ForceWare drivers again like a few days ago.

Anyway, hope you solve your problem man. Some good people trying to help you here. Good luck!

I am using a Antec True Blue 450 Watt power supply. Acording to alot of friends and after reading stuff on it on the net, I've come to the conclusion that its a good power supply. I am running the AMD 2600+ which supposely draws more power than the Pentium chip.

How r ya buddy? Good suggestions. I've not check the lastest update for both the video card and my motherboard in the last 2 months. I should give that a try. I will keep you posted to see if there is any improvement!

aka @Toad

Bro, I didn't know it was you. Good to see you're still alive man! Out to lunch!

Yeah, I'm still alive but very busy these day. I am a proud father of a 5 month old daughter now so time is NOT on my side. War2 got pushed to the back of the list these days but I still play on West server from time to time. I lag on East most of the time so West is a new home for me. Drop by to say hi sometime!

Yeah man I will. I'm on the same spot on kali to keep in touch with everyone. I play Call of Duty mostly when I'm not playing basketball. Congrats on the kid man.

I didn't quite read the whole thread but I caught that someone was having problems with a card or something... a suggestion:
Make sure you have your memory running in-sync because if you are running older type memory such as SD-ram, and your video card runs DDR you can cause lock ups on older (year old) mother boards. I had that problem. My ram was sd, and video was ddr... my system would lock up for no reason after about 30 minutes.

Well April 14th is here and Nvidia's new card has been announced: Geforce 6800Ultra. I will give a brief summary of it incase mage was still debating which video card to buy:
It fixes most of the major issues with NV30/NV35, and is faster than the Radeon 9800. Image quality has also been majorly improved, to the point where it is comparable to the Radeon 9800, better in a few cases. It is not available retail yet, will take at least 45 days for that to happen.
Having said that I still have to recommend the Radeon 9800 for a video card purchase for the following reasons:
1. The Geforce 6800Ultra retail price is $499, and the Geforce 6800 regular is $299, far above the budget limit listed earlier.
2. It will take at least 45 days to become available mass-market, 9800 is available now.
3. Early adopters of new video card technology unwittenly become "beta" testers of video drivers. I would rather get a more mature card/driver that has many of the early bugs fixed. Already some image quality bugs in farcry were pointed out in several reviews.

quote:

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Originally posted by kublikhan
Well April 14th is here and Nvidia's new card has been announced: Geforce 6800Ultra. I will give a brief summary of it incase mage was still debating which video card to buy:
It fixes most of the major issues with NV30/NV35, and is faster than the Radeon 9800. Image quality has also been majorly improved, to the point where it is comparable to the Radeon 9800, better in a few cases. It is not available retail yet, will take at least 45 days for that to happen.
Having said that I still have to recommend the Radeon 9800 for a video card purchase for the following reasons:
1. The Geforce 6800Ultra retail price is $499, and the Geforce 6800 regular is $299, far above the budget limit listed earlier.
2. It will take at least 45 days to become available mass-market, 9800 is available now.
3. Early adopters of new video card technology unwittenly become "beta" testers of video drivers. I would rather get a more mature card/driver that has many of the early bugs fixed. Already some image quality bugs in farcry were pointed out in several reviews.

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Hey good luck man and Kubli made some good points there. I've also seen some leaked specs for the next ATI flagship card. Unless it's false they're going to start using the fast DDR 3 ram that nv has been using too. I'm not sure which will be faster but I think I noticed TWO molex connectors on an nv40 reference photo and to me that might be overkill. Maybe Kub can confirm this.

Yes the NV40 uses 2 molex power connectors. If you try to run the card with only 1 power connector, you get warning dialogs in windows that you are running in "low power" mode. The recommended power suply for this beast of a video card is 480w+, many reviewers were able to run in on 440w without any problems however.
Power and heat dissapation requirements of cpus and video cards are starting to get pretty insane. There was a joke back when NV30 was released that soon we would be sitting in front of a massive power supply/heat sink and would just insert our new micro motherboard into the mammoth heat sink whenever we needed to upgrade.