Video Card Junkie

I'm with you on the carbs.

poor carbs……… always getting blamed for things :(
better them then me though :P

tsk. Don't go to the dark side.

Tell me about it. I tried to put a GeForce 5200 FX in my machine last weekend, and I'm still paying for the mess it caused. At least reinstalling everything from scratch motivated me to dump MS Office and start over with Open Office and the Thunderbird/Firebird tag team. So far, I'm liking all three.

I agree. I had crabs over the weekend at Lega Seafood and they didnt taste so fresh. OH! You guys were talking about CARBS.. OPS

Man cannot survive on technology and gadgets alone **grin**

GRRRR….ATi!

One thing I find curious is how much cooling the latest and greatest video cards need. I guess I never really knew how loud my current setup was until I spent some time in front of a MacG5. But not all Mac's are quiet. Ever hear an X-serve? Sheesh, almost as loud as my pc. I'm beginning to wonder how much this ambient noise level I've endured for years, is affecting me…..

I love ATI. I've had a AIW Radeon for ages and it's still going strong. But I don't do much heavy gaming.
Chris, ATI has a “Trade-up” program. Perhaps you should check it out.
http://www.ati.com/buy/traderebate/tradeup.html

Windows, the OS you love to hate. Drive imaging would give you faster reconstruction. Powerquest's Drive Image v7 will image in Windows XP GUI, on your set schedule while you work.
If you mean the ATI Radeon 9800 XT, yeah. Technolust, pure and simple. The gamers will drool over them, with drool cup attached for safety. I doubt I'd lay out serious cash for negligible bragging rights. Wait a few months until the price comes down.
Newest barrage of buzzwords they are using to hype this card is like a specially devised engineerÂ’s language, that only an engineer would be able to fully appreciate. “The worldÂ’s first visual processor developed using a low k dielectric process.” Whatever.

i just got done reinstalling windows on one of my machines.. its always a treat when windows decideds to **** out.
i wasnt fully frusterated until it came to the updates.. even with sp1 i still had to download 100mb of updates. i just updated another server box.. i ahve had to do nearly 200mb of updates. makes me want an apple.

Yea, Nvidia has gone downhill lately.
Not only that, but every single time they release a new version of drivers, they seem to cause problems…I used to be an ATI guy, wonder why I switched…

Screw ATI. I have bought there cards in the past and shipped the things right back!

yeah…tell mr about reinstallations…i've done four this week and one computer is still acting very strangeley.

had direct3 probs too with nvidia ti4400, found out my fan was blown.. 3 years warranty, now i have a ati radeon 9600. Hope i get refund for th e nvidia card. Maybe for once i am lucky.

Hmm…I eat LOTS of carbs, my XP home works just dandy, and I have an ATI Radeon 900 Pro video card and boy does my monitor look SWEET…sweet as a sweet delicious OREO…MMMM….
OREOS!!!!
Hee hee!

Radeon 900 Pro huh? That card might make my overclocked Ti200 card look good. :o)

Chris, You're the type of guy that should buy a card and tweak it!
They should have some left, but newegg.com had some Sapphire Radeon 9500 left. Yeah yeah, but using a simple driver file tweak you can get it running as if it were a 9700! The success rate is about 60%. I did this and 2 out of 3 were able to be tweaked to run all 8 pipelines and it is absolutely utterly undamaging to the card if it doesn't work. OK, so it's not the latest, but it's DX9 compliant and still fast enough for Doom 3 or Half Life 2 when they come out!

LOL Greg! I have an ATI Radeon 9000 Pro, not 900. I guess it really is the carbs!
Hee hee!

I just got done going the other direction: An ATI Radeon 9700 to a GeForce 5200 FX Ultra. I had nothing but problems with the ATI. Come to think of it, I've not had the best of success with the other two ATI cards I've owned in the past. The nVidia is reportedly considerably slower than the ATI; but for my needs, I haven't noticed any difference. Each to his own, I guess.

Why reinstall windows when you could have a perfectly good imaged disk using GHOST? I guess if you are replacing any hardware, reinstalling is the way to go. Oh well good luck with ATI, I for one am still a NVIDIA consumer

Huh, I have had little trouble with either Nvidia Geforce 2 or my new ATI 9500 card. I find it difficult to believe anybody elase does either except for the occasional game driver issue, but oh well. :) I wouldn't buy anything earlier than an ATI 9500 though.

If they would just open their source, some of us could help you better, Chris. Send Ballmer a note, will ya? :)

I used to have to reinstall windows all the time. I learned to make it bearable by using connected.com's client, which could reinstall all of my data files. So now I have a mac, and now I don't have to reinstall the operating system every few weeks. I can pretty much live with that…

I moved to an ATI card and have not looked back. Much more stable and better performing than my Nvidia card. Drivers for Nvidia on XP were always a source of pain for me.

I ve used both ti 4600 w/pvr 250 ,and 9700 aiw and they both performed great but ati seems to be alittle more hassle free , if you stay with the drivers that work. Thats ashame ,but its just a gamble every time you update. good luck

Hey Chris I think it would be best to switch to ATI and fast. I bought a GeForce FX 5600 256DDR and the performance I got out of it was NOTHING compared to the Radeon 9800 SE 128DDR. They both cost around the same price at the time of debut. I love my Radeon and the framerates are just awesome. MAKE THE SWITCH!

For 2d graphics and desktop use the Matrox Parhelia is the ONLY one to get, especially for cad, multiple monitors, etc…
One of the older Matrox cards would suffice for most desktop users who don't do 3d gaming.

See http://www.nocrash.com/ncbbs/msgs/157.shtml