Currently I'm running on a GF4 Ti4200 and thinking of a low budget upgrade to get a fully dx9 compliant card for OoW.

So since I'm totally clueless these days about the vid card market (lost my touch with that world about 3 years ago..) I need a bit help.

1. Am I right that GF4 Ti4200 isn't fully dx9 compliant? (the stuff is from 2 years ago alright...)

2. Reading some articles online gives me the impression that the current low end cards (like FX5200) are still slower than my Ti4200. Is that accurate?


So! The question is, what are the cheapest (below $150 if possible) dx9 vid cards (ATI/Nvidia) currently on the market that provide better beformance than the GF4 Ti4200.

Thanks in advance :)

PS: thinking about buying a 2.8Ghz P4 too to upgrade my 1.7 Ghz p4....I'm broke so no cash to buy new motherboard etc, just trying to get my current machine to work decently.

Correct, the GeForce 4 Ti line is fully DX-8 compliant only. For your price range, I'd settle for an ATI Radeon 9600XT (128 MB - you don't really need 256 megs of RAM for that card).

The equivalent NVIDIA card would probably be the 5700, but I'm wary of the whole FX 5xxx line for some reason... probably the dustbuster I guess.

Upgrading from 1.7 Ghz may help a little bit, but I would focus more on the new video card. This is especially true if that 2.8 you're looking at isn't HT; 1.7 GHz should serve you well enough.

One of my putes is running the 5200 and one is running the Ti4200. The 5200 pute is running 2 gigs of ram and 3.00 ghz, and the 4200 is running 1 gig and 2.60 ghz. Both putes work trouble free running EQ, and I have checked the EQ2 stuff out (films and such) on both putes without any observable difference.

I will most likely at some point in the future look into the 6600GT for both, but it will be more because I want to than that I have to, unless the release of EQ2 shows something different than what I have seen so far.

The Sept/Oct 2004 issue of PC Upgrade has some good stuff to say about the 6600GT, and the corresponding ATI card. You might want to give it a read for further info.

Actually, why don't you get two GeForce 6800 PCI-X x2 and put them in an SLI format? Would probably own any PCI-X card(s) ATI has to offer, as I'm not sure they plan to release any SLI format cards. But then I suppose that could get rather expensive, but who knows.

Another question,

ATI 9600Pro vs. 9600XT? Any first hand experiences? Rumors etc etc....

the XT is clocked higher, but the differences are minimal

>
Actually, why don't you get two GeForce 6800 PCI-X x2 and put them in an SLI format? Would probably own any PCI-X card(s) ATI has to offer, as I'm not sure they plan to release any SLI format cards. But then I suppose that could get rather expensive, but who knows.

thats a $600 set up, not to mention a power hungry set up, plus heat as well, not to mention nvidia hasn't released a 6800 card yet with a SLI connector on them, nor do they have SLI supported in their drivers

SLI is going to be mainly hit with the 6600's, the native pci-express cards nvidia is releasing, no extra power molex is required, ram doesn't run hot (128bit interface, doesn't even need heat sinks on the ram) single slot solutions, $200, these cards are perfect for their SLI market

Guess my 9800pro melted and I'm in the market for something snazzy.
So I'm looking for any radeon upgrade that's worth the cash (as in: not completely new on the market, something around 6 months perhaps?). Looking to spend I dunno...$200?

Oh hardware gods, what say ye?

concidering ATI's mid rang cards that are in the $200 bracket are the 9800pro's still, you might be sol for the 6 month old deal, ATI right now doesn't have a huge selection of cards, and nothing that you can get that is only 6 months old

both companies are pushing big time for the pci-express market, just about all the mid range cards that are being released in the near future are native to pci-express and will be later bridged for AGP if there is any demand for it

right now ATI owns the market for vid cards under $200, can't really compete with their price/performance ratio's, my suggestion, just get another 9800pro

Man it feels like such a waste to buy an identical card to one I've had for over a year.

Well, get something a little newer then =)

Ze money! Ze money iz ze problem!

Riva TNT 2, baby!

Using a GF3 ti200 in the interim.