Shopping for new video card

[Woofers]

Evening all,

I'm running CMBB (& CMBO) quite happily on a three year old stock standard HP Pavilion 9722, although the scrolling gets a little slow in CMBB on medium sized maps, even with most of the frilly bits turned off.

The current specs are: 850MHz Athlon, 128 MB Ram & currently with an AGP 4X nVidia TNT2 Pro with 16 MB.

I'm thinking a video card with more memory should speed things up a smidge & I'm trying to figure out what to buy. From what I can see, I stay away from ATI Radeon like the plague due to the fog problems, avoid Kyro & Kyro II chipsets and show caution when it comes to GeForce cards due to driver problems.

What other cards does this leave (I'm a little behind the technology curve, as you may be able to tell)? Am I being unnecessarily cautious with respect to the above cards?

All help/suggestions appreciated.

[ July 03, 2003, 04:32 AM: Message edited by: Woofers ]

[Jarmo]

If you can still find a GF4Ti 4200, it should serve you fine.

64MB version should be plenty, given that you wont be playing the

most demanding games anyway.

If a GF3 can still be found somewhere, it should also be good

enough. (it should be much cheaper to be worth it though)

The newer GF4Ti4800, and the FX series seem to have more driver problems,

but at least the 4800's should have them cleared out by now.

There will be problems with antialiasing, but it cant be helped I guess.

[Panzertruppe]

Like Jarmo said....stay away from the new FX cards(nothing but problems). Any of the cards mentioned will work well with the CM games.

I like using my old Geforce 2 MMX card on my P-3 866 and CMBB runs very well( the only time my map scrolling is a bit slow is when there is lots of smoke...I just turn it off).If your on a budget the Geforce 2 32 meg card runs about 20 dollars now!

I would also get more ram......about 128 megs more would be good!

Good luck!

[ July 03, 2003, 08:05 AM: Message edited by: Panzertruppe ]

[Jack Carr]

You may want to also consider a processor upgrade. Can your current motherboard support a more powerful processor? This might be the smarter upgrade in your case.

[Jack Carr]

An AMD Athlon 1.3ghz processor on Googlegear is $43.00. The GeForce Ti4200 with 4x AGP, 8X AGP causes problems because of driver issues, runs $100.00+.

[Woofers]

Thanks for the advice, everyone.

After checking some prices on the net, trundled off to the local computer dude to see what he had. The choices were (in Australian dollars, better known as Banana Republic Pesos): A Ti4200 with 128Mb at $240, a Ge4 64Mb DDRAM for $100 & a Ge4 64Mb SDRAM for $80. After some humming & hah-ing & discussions with the dude, decided that considering the computer it was going into (and the need to save up for a new system to run CM2), the best option price/performance wise was the DDRAM Ge4.

Tried installing the little bastard , but was getting a series of 3 beeps (1 long, 2 short) as soon as the power came on & black screen. Checked it was properly seated, swapped back to the old card (worked OK still), back to the new, same problem. Back to the shop I go. Dude tries the card in another machine, card works. Try the SDRAM Ge4 in mine & works OK. The best we can figure is that my poor old motherboard (K7M) can't supply enough juice to run the DDRAM. Cut my losses, take my $20 refund & head home with the SDRAM card.

Good news is, the card works very nicely & scrolling is much better, particularly on large maps, which were a real grind before.

As far as other options go, it's a Slot A motherboard, so I've got just about the quickest processor you can squeeze in. The extra RAM is probably the next (& last) thing I'll do, just to cut down the amount of disk activity going on (just enough to annoy me every now & then).

Thanks again for all the info.