Upgrade question?

[Tony Glass]

A friend of mine bought a computer from Gateway and it had to have the hard drive replace a short time ago. The guys at gateway said he should upgrade some parts and wanted to do it for him at a price. I said I would help him ,so we added some more memory (now 320meg pc 133) and he needs a new vid card.
He doesn't have a lot of money so I have a Voocoo 3 3000 agp and voodoo 5 5500 pci I can give him.
Is either better than his Nvidia TnT Vanta Graphics Accelerator 16 meg (thats what it says in the spec sheet) or should we go and get him something like a Geforce 2 mx.
I'm not sure about what type of mobois in it but it has an Athlon 950 and he doesn't do much gaming (some), just mostly internet surfing and work.

Thanks,
TG

[DrZaius]

I would go with the Voodoo5, it would be definately be better than any Vanta or GF2MX.

[Tony Glass]

What about the Voodoo 3 how does it fair against the Vanta?
or the Geforce 2 MX cards?

tg

[theENiGMA]

First of all, despite the fact that I loved my Voodoo3, I must say beware of driver support. If you are running XP, forget it. You won't be able to find a driver that can run all games (well most anyway) like up to date drivers from ATi or nvidia. If you are running Me or 98, you can find a decent driver set, it will just take some work. In order to run newer OpenGL games (such as Jedi knight II) properly you will need the leatest (ha!) beta driver from Voodoofiles.com under the original 3dfx section (for the 3 anyway, don't know about the 5). Also, Jedi Knight in particular has some known issues with Voodoo chipsets. Namely; unreadable in game text, screwed up cutscenes, and random graphics glitches in the save menu, but the game is still playable. So if you are able to deal with these hurdles, I would go with either the Voodoo3 or 5. I believe either will work better than the TNT card. Otherwise, I upgraded to a ATi Radeon 7500, which is very cheap, and I could not be happier. Even my GFs Radeon 7000 ($40 newegg) will be better than the TNT. I dunno if any of this makes sense, I'm tired but I wanted to finish out this forum, sorry for any bum advice I may have just given.
-KEiTH

[morriswindgate]

Skip the VooDoos and the GForce2, instead go to newegg. com and get one of the Powered by ATI Radeon LE 64MB of SDR for $39.00. Although it is SDR it is a great card and has zero problems running Quake, Nascar, MOHAA, and anything else I have tested with it during builds.
Also depending on the age of the Gateway, he may want to invest 30 bucks or so in an ATA133 IDE Controller card to hook that new hard drive to. If the Gate is a couple of years old this will improve the performance more than the RAM did.