Know about hardware? Read this

[Joe]

Hi all

I have a one year old athlonxp 1800 sitting in a chaintech apogee
KT266/KT333 mobo with a stick of 512MB DDR PC2100 unbuffered ram, 40GB
samsung 7200 HD, *nvidia tnt model 64 32MB video card*, SBlive! and yamaha
sw1k sound cards. I am using xp home edition

I am beginning to think it's about time I replaced the now bargan basket
nvidia tnt card with something better. When I switch windows media player 9
from normal screen to full screen while playing the 3D visualization at the
same time I am playing music via cd or hd through the sblive card the sound
drops out and glitch's. I can't remember if it has always done this. It's
not a big problem really but as time goes on and the novelty wears off, you
start messing about with stuff and start wondering if you can make it run
better. The screen res is 1024x768 at 85Hz with 32bit color. The bios is set
up ok. Xp is co-operating in ACPI uniprocessor mode and being xp it has set
the modem, sblive and nvidia all to standard IRQ 16. They are all on
different extended irq channels though according to other system info
proggy's so the irq 16 setting is normal apparently. Mmmmm?
Also, when I have won a game of solitaire and the cards start the cascade
effect they cascade slowly untill I move the mouse pointer about and then
the cascade effect speeds up. lol. These are my benchmark tests! lol.

Anyways. What do you think? Can I set anything to stop the glitch's or have
I reached the graphics card's limits with the res, refresh rate and colour
depth settings.

Thanks

Joe

 

[Mike]

Retire the old video card and buy a new one. You'll love the difference it
makes.

 

[chris.catt]

Ahhh, but what card? It does really depend on how much you want to spend,
butperhaps I can help with a few suggestions. Most of the lower series
Nvidia's should be avoided, the FX5700Ultra is meant to be a good one and at
around £139, fairly reasonable. I actually went form your card to a Nvidia
Ti1200P Turbo, that card was a beaut and would play Halo at 1024 X 768 with
eveything turned up. If money is no object then either the ATI9800XT, at
around £400, which I've got, or the 9800Pro at a lower price of around £250
and apparently the 9600Pro isn't too bad either at around £120. What you
really need to do is decide on your budget, have a look at a few cards in
the price range, see if there are any reviews by searching for them in
google. Then post up your short list and see what comes back, a good forum
for either of the main video chipsets are here
http://www.amdforums.com/forumdisplay.php?s=&daysprune=15&forumid=51
and here
http://www.amdforums.com/forumdisplay.php?s=&daysprune=15&forumid=50
Good luck......
Chris C