Miser wants to get the most bang for my buck buying a video card

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Will

I've been running an AthlonXP 1800+ system on an ECS K7S5A motherboard
with 512 MB of DDR memory. I don't even know what my video card is
right now, but I think it's a PCI card with maybe 4MB of memory (if
that). I'm looking to buy a new card, hopefully in the sub $100 range
and wanted to get some opinions on cards to look for and cards to
avoid. I do some 3d gaming, but nothing cutting edge. Probably the
most intense games I own are Half-Life and American McGee's Alice.
Primarily I want to be able to run 3D CAD modeling programs like
SolidWorks and listen to MP3s at the same time without horrendous
slowdowns and sound jitters. Right now that is a painful experience
at best. I know the motherboard is an AGP 4x system (will 8x cards
work in a 4x slot? I can't seem to find a definitive answer on
this...) I'm running Windows 2000 as an OS, so drivers shouldn't be a
big issue. So I pose the question to the audience, what would you
recommend?
Thanks in advance!
-Will
 
Will said:
I've been running an AthlonXP 1800+ system on an ECS K7S5A motherboard
with 512 MB of DDR memory. I don't even know what my video card is
right now, but I think it's a PCI card with maybe 4MB of memory (if
that). I'm looking to buy a new card, hopefully in the sub $100 range
and wanted to get some opinions on cards to look for and cards to
avoid. I do some 3d gaming, but nothing cutting edge. Probably the
most intense games I own are Half-Life and American McGee's Alice.
Primarily I want to be able to run 3D CAD modeling programs like
SolidWorks and listen to MP3s at the same time without horrendous
slowdowns and sound jitters. Right now that is a painful experience
at best. I know the motherboard is an AGP 4x system (will 8x cards
work in a 4x slot? I can't seem to find a definitive answer on
this...) I'm running Windows 2000 as an OS, so drivers shouldn't be a
big issue. So I pose the question to the audience, what would you
recommend?
Click to expand...

First, the AGP should not be an issue--nearly all AGP 8X boards are
backward-compatible to at least AGP 4X and some go farther than that.

SolidWorks wants a board that supports OpenGL, it doesn't need DirectX 9, so
there's no real need for one of the current generation of boards. You
really should get a workstation board, but they're more than you want to
pay. Your best bet given the conditions you describe would probably be a
Geforce 4 Ti4200--they're as fast as the midrange Radeon and GeforceFX
boards and can be had for well under $100US, and in general OpenGL works
better on the Geforce boards than on the Radeons.

There's also a way to force the Geforce 4 boards to function as Quadro
boards--it's called "SoftQuadro 4"
<http://www.guru3d.com/index.php?page=rivatuner> and I have not used it so
have no idea how well it works--the Quadro and Geforce boards use the same
chip with different microcode so in principle it should work fine.
 
sound jitters is down to your on board audio card - replace with a hard
audio card and the jitters should go
 
ATI 8500, 8500LE and 9100 have the same GPU chip.
9000 and 9200 have a slightly slimed down version of that chip.
So the ATI 9100 (Direct X 8.1) is the best bang for the buck.

ATI 9600 (Direct X 9.0) is faster (the 9600SE is a version with slow 200mhz,
64 bit memory access).
The "normal" 9600 (also 9600PRO and 9600XT) use 300-325mhz, 128 bit memory
access
The 9600 PRO and 9600XT have even faster GPUs , but cost more then what you
are looking to spend.

Do not know why you have system jitters.
 
Daren Evans said:
sound jitters is down to your on board audio card - replace with a hard
audio card and the jitters should go
Click to expand...

Nope, I have a separate PCI Soundblaster card. The ONLY time I hear
any sound screwups is when I do things that require a lot of changes
to the screen, like rotating/editing a SolidWorks model or dragging
window panes around the screen too fast. Half Life is abysmal with
sound too. My girlfriend has an almost identical system (since I
built hers as well) except I splurged on a 64MB video card and hers is
rock solid on sound and video.
-Will
 
Just wanted to say thanks to all who replied. I wound up going a
little over budget ($134) but with that I got a geforce4 ti4200 128MB
from Asus (9280 Video Suite, retail box with all the toys). Side
note, the sound problem was solved, no more glitches. I can now spin
complex solidworks models as fast as I can with no distortion on the
sound, which is still the crappy onboard from the ECS K7S5A. But if
you run that into a good stereo with amp it comes out fine.
Anyway, The graphics look sweet, I installed ElderScrolls III which
came with it and it looks very smooth at high resolution. I'm about
to download the SoftQuadro4 patch to upgrade the card, so I'll let
people know how that turns out. One last comment, for some reason the
diagnostics doctor shows my AGP port running at 1.69V instead of 3.3
volts. I'll ahve to check if I can change that in the bios or
something. But even with that limiting my card to 2x AGP it's still a
world of difference! Thanks again!
-Will
 
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