New machine in the works, lookin for ideas...

[Xayd]

Well, this budget box I recently built is being sold to the little brother in college, and I'm looking to build a new Duron machine here in the next month or so. Looking for video card recommendations.

Price range here is 150-175 bucks. From looking at Voodoo4's, they don't seem to be anything but Voodoo3's with 32 megs of RAM instead of 16. I've got a Voodoo3 now, which was a great bang for the buck card for this Socket7 box, but I'm looking for a bit more with this machine.

This is gonna be a gaming machine, with the prime game still being UT, so if I'm gonna ditch Glide speed is the biggest consideration here.

For you folks who will undoubtedly recommend Nvidia, what manufacturers have you had the best success with on the Nvidia cards? On the flip side what manufacturers of Nvidia cards do you avoid?

BTW, this box will have 98 for gaming, but the big partition will be Linux, so Linux support is a must. I'd like to have some gaming speed on the Linux side if possible, instead of just a driver and support for standard resolutions.

All advice appreciated, as always...

Xayd



[Edited by Xayd on 09-09-2000 at 05:28 AM]

[Tiretool]

Xayd, I play Unreal and UT on my Elsa Erazor X in D3D mode and if I set the display to 16 bit color I get seemless flawless play at 50+ FPS on a AMD K6-3 450 with 128 megs of Ram. That is the only game that I have to do this for. All my other games written in OpenGL scream in 32 bit.
As usual I'd recommend the GeForce 256 with DDR Ram. Stay away from the GeForce 2 MX as it's capabilities are shaded even by the GeForce 256 DDR. If you can save and scrounge up some extra, then go for the GeForce 2. Otherwise I would recommend a GeForce 256 DDR.

Elsa Erazor X2
Guillemot: Hercules 3D Prophet DDR
ASUStek V6800 Pure 3D DDR
Leadtek Winfast GeForce DDR

In my opinion... these are listed in order with the best on top. I'd try to stay away from not-so-well-known companies. If you've never heard of the company on this forum... then you can be pretty sure that it's a small company that might not be around next month... and thus might not be able to support the product.

All of the above can be found on Pricewatch for between $170 and $190.

Not sure about Linux support... but I'm sure you could look on the companies' websites and find out for sure on that.

Good luck and happy building.