Don’t get the GeForce 4 MX. It’s basically a sped-up GeForce 2 with a new few features, but in many ways it’s inferior to the GeForce 3. The rest of the GeForce 4 line is great (I have a GeForce 4 Ti4400 and there’s not a game I can’t play in the highest detail on my 1.5Ghz relic), but probably beyond the limit you set on yourself. I’m sure you could find a good GeForce 3 cheap, and that’s more than you need…my friend uses my old 64MB GeForce 2 and he can play almost any game on at least medium detail.
Considering a 3g machine with a GF4 Ti4600 gets ~40fps at 1600x1200 in Unreal Tournament 2003 I beg to differ And thats without antiailising on. You couldn’t run any FPS game at more than 1024 with antiailising enabled current
When I was in the market for a video card, I went into a computer shop and said “I’d like a new video card, but not an MX card - everyone says I shouldn’t get one of those.”
And so they nodded, and showed me their selection - and every damned last one of them was an MX card.
I’ll put a suggestion in for the ATI Radeon 9x series… the lower numbered ones are a bit faster than the 8500 I’ve had for about a year now… they should be around your price range and give you a decent amount of power.
www.extremetech.com had a featureweighing the cost vs. performance of most budget cards a few weeks back.
PCI - that is going to be a bottleneck on your speed, I reccomend getting the PCI versioin of the Radeon 9000, should provide a good speed boost. What I would like to know is, why in the world would anyone make a Pentium4 motherboard without a AGP slot?
Jake save yourself the frustration of dealing with ATI drivers. Nvidia is known for a quality product that always works. ATI is known throughout the industry for having very bad drivers that will have problems with games.
Because the MX versions of the card are the scaled down versions. They are significantly slower than the non-MX versions because the parts used to make the card. It’s a cheap card for a reason
Other than that you can get something much better for the same price by shopping on the internet.
They are crippled, severely. They are made to be “cheap” and go after the not-so-knowledgable market.
A GF3 of pretty much any version is a faster card than any MX… and generally cheaper to boot.
That’s probably your best deal, right there… or something close.
I’ve also heard good things about the Radeons, to be fair, but never owned one myself. I’ve had a Geforce 256, GF2 GTS, and my GF4 and never had any problems.
Handy, The manual says it’s an AGP or ADD slot, nothing about AGP2. Kewk, Bernse, I will stay away from MX, thanks.
Harmonix, great links, Thanks!
Looks like its gonna be a GeForce 4 Ti series for me.
The Geforde 4 Ti 4200 is an excellent card for its price. I have a Ti4600(same card, but clocked higher and more expensive) and it has worked wonderfully.
Actually, if you do go with the Radeon cards, get the 8500 or 9100(same card, but renamed) over the 9000, because the 8500 is actually faster in most games, that why they came out with the renamed 9100 version.