Card Reconmendations

[PANiC_nz]

hi

i'm lookin to buy a new vid card and was wondering wat people would reckonmend. Currently looking at buying a Geforce 4 Ti4200 128mb RAM or ATI Radeon 8500 128mb RAM. This is mainly for lite gaming but i want it to not need replacing for a while. Hardware DVD playback would be nice. I am relativly up to date with the nvidia range of cards and understand there branding such as MX and Ti but dont really understand the ATI branding could someone please list form worse to best the abreviations that ATI use.

thanx to anyone that replies

[Charger]

Welocome to the MECH

If your going to be gaming and DVD watching, I'd reccomend the ATI Radeon. HArdcore gamers like the GeForce 4 Ti4400, but it sounds like you're a casual user

[DrZaius]

Hi PANiC_nz, welcome to the PC Mech forums!

I second O Beachian's recommendations for the ATI Radeon 8500, it's great for gaming and DVD playback.

[Texuspete00]

Yeah, the GF is a better gaming card, but ATI may be better for DVD's etc. while still being a good gaming card. The regular radeon 8500 has core/mem speeds of 275/275 while the LE (sounds good right) is 250/250. Something to looke out for. Oh yeah, the 8500's outperforms the 9000 so I wouldn't get that b/c it seems like you are willing to pay for the better performance. Just a conclusion i made from your consideration of the GF4 128MB which will probably be more than both the 8500 and 9000. Cards not built by ATI may use diff naming schemes, look for the 275/275.

[morriswindgate]

ATI, I should add, probably as many people run ATI Cards as there are people running GForce Cards on this forum, but most vid card problems are from GForce cards. NOw the Gforce is a good chip, but there are too many cheapie card builders using the GForce chips that unless you pay the higher end price, you stand to get a really poor performing card of dubious quality that has a really powerful chip on it. And if you do pay the price for the quality cards, you are paying more than you will for an ATI based card from ATI.
I wish NVidia would clamp down on who they sell their chips to or at least demand some quality and consistancy. I have seen GForce Cards where the software was on a Silver/Blue Inkjet printable CD-R out of a sealed box.
Also I believe that their is a certain amount of hype with the GFORCE series of cards that is not justified based upon my use of both cards. And I really like the quality and picture from ATI.