What is a good Basic Video Card

[mangyDOG]

What are your recommendations for a basic video card for "office" type computers, ie: used for work and not games... :wink:

This is what I want (in no particular order...)

- low cost (under AUD$50 wholesale extax)
- totaly reliable
- simple driver installation or native Windows 2000/XP support
- passive heatsink (no more fans please)

All the cards I had been using for low cost office machines are no longer available (mainly 8Mb cards like SIS6328 or S3 Trio3d/2x). I tried some ATI Rage Pro cards which were OK but then my supplier changed brands and the new ones caused random BSODs every few hours. ...

I had been using Sparkle TNT2 M64 cards which were OK but were phased out and my supplier now only has Paradise ones which have an active fan, and give me a nagging feeling they are not quite as stable.
I am about to try the MSI TNT2 M64 cards which I hope are good quality and do have a passive heatsink, but are quite a bit more expensive.

Anyone got any alternative suggestions?

Thanks
mangyDOG

 

[time]

Radeon 7000? Not quite under AU$50, but almost certainly less than MSI M64.

Asus V3800 (TNT2), if you can find any.

 

[Mercutio]

ATI 7000 would get my vote as well. It's a nice general purpose card. If I'm on a true budget mission, I'll look for S3 Savage4s, SiS730s or system pull Gx00 cards.

 

[Buck]

In order to get below 50.00 AUD, I'd have to go with the ATI Xpert 98 with 8MB of memory. In the 50.00 AUD to 60.00 AUD range, I could sell the ATI Xpert 2000 with 32MB of memory and a 128-bit data width. The ATI 7000 with 32MB of memory and TV Out would be a few dollars more.

 

[Mercutio]

The Xpert's 2D quality isn't very good. A Rage Pro is much better if you're going that low-end.

 

[Buck]

The Xpert 2000 is a Rage Pro 128.

 

[Mercutio]

That's odd. I'm pretty sure the Xpert lineup was plain ol' Rage 128s.

 

[CougTek]

That's odd. I'm pretty sure the Xpert lineup was plain ol' Rage 128s.

Not sure, but I think the Xpert 2000 was a Rage 128 Pro with a narrower memory bus and slower memory chips.

 

[Buck]

My mistake gentlemen. The ATI Xpert 2000 uses the Rage 128-bit engine and is thus not a Pro. However, the Xpert 98 uses the Rage XL engine (even though it is only 64-bit) which puts it in the Pro family. Here is a quick list from ATI:

RAGE 128 PRO:
ALL IN WONDER128 PRO

RAGE 128:
ALL IN WONDER128
XPERT 2000
XPERT 128

RAGE PRO:
XPERT 98

 

[Tannin]

You were on the right track first time, Mangy One. TNT M-64: utterly reliable, reasonably cheap, totally fuss-free. That's what we use them for too: entry-level and business machines. The Sparkles were great! I think we still have six or eight in stock, I haven't looked around to see what we are going to replace them with.

I'd far rather risk a fan failing than delve into the murky water of anything with an ATI chipset. Sometimes ATI stuff works just fine, sometimes it causes massive problems. For a business machine, it's a bad move. You can't trust them.

If you are really stuck, there are some cheap SiS 64MB things kicking around the market at present. I'd prefer a TNT of course, but they would still be a safer bet than ATI.

 

[Mercutio]

Tannin, do you just not like your customers?

ATI is the solution, not the problem. The Radeon 7000 in particular is just about the most fuss-free card I've worked with in recent memory, with 2D quality that's far, far better than anything else I can buy for US$29.

 

[blakerwry]

so basically we have

1) TNT/TNT2/Vanta
2) Radeon 7000


These cards are dirt cheap, offer more than enough power for most office computers, easy to install, and are very reliable... all of the above can be found in passively cooled versions as well.

 

[Tannin]

In a sense, that's exactly right. I hate it when customers come back with a computer under their arm because it doesn't work.

Some brands and models of ATI-based card work just fine, once you get used to their driver weirdness. Other ones are an unmitigated disaster (as Kristi and I have seen for ourselves only too well and only too often.)

Every single brand of TNT card I have ever used has been plug in, load Dets, forget. They just work.

 

[Mercutio]

What driver weirdness?
With recent cards?

 

[Jan Kivar]

How about motherboard with integrated adapter? Intel makes many chipsets with graphics adapter. Some boards come in mATX form factor, so You can have/use smaller cases. nForce2 could be a bit overkill.

Cheers,

Jan

 

[blakerwry]

That's not a bad idea... i've seen intel brand boards with onboard NIC, Audio, and video go for under $100.. the only problem is that most intel boards dont seem very future proof...

I am pretty disapointed with the graphics on my 845GE (p4 nothwood capable chipset).. the video is much less sharp than anything else I've ever used... additionally the screen blanks out(like it's changing refresh rates) everytime i goto display properties at a resolution higher than 800x600...

I've also had trouble getting DVD software to run well on it... i dont remember what I eventually did.. but i tried powerDVD and winDVD and both had the same problem.

 

[Jake the Dog]

I'd be getting the TNT-M64 too. they can be had for under $50 as as Tannin has already mentioned, they always work.

 

[Mercutio]

Only if your definition of "working" includes things like overheating or hard-locking a PC.

Thanks, I'll take a video card that doesn't do that.

 

[mangyDOG]

How about motherboard with integrated adapter? Intel makes many chipsets with graphics adapter. Some boards come in mATX form factor, so You can have/use smaller cases. nForce2 could be a bit overkill.

I have had varying results with integrated adaptors and most of them have not been that great, especially on the cheaper mobos. I would also prefer to chew my arm off :wink: than sell a mATX or flexATX motherboard. Anything with only 2 dimm slots, 3 pci and no agp slot is not a good investment in upgradability IMHO...

Thanks for the feedback on the other cards, looks like I am on the right track with the TNT cards and I will get an ATI 7000 for my test box to see how it goes...

cheers,
mangyDOG

 

[CougTek]

There's a lot of FUD on both side in this thread. An over-heating TNT2-M64? ATI current cards lineup having drivers weirdness?

Given the choice between a TNT2-M64 and a Radeon 7000, I would make Mercutio smile and opt for the ATI. Although not top-notch (not up to the level of the 8500 and above, mainly due to lower quality filters and slower RAMDAC), its 2D quality certainly is above the one of every M64 I've seen. Before the Titanium initiative from nVidia, the 2D quality of their cards varied a lot, usually on the low-end of the spectrum. For the cheaper models (like the TNT2-M64, built from the start to be a budget model), it was even worst. Cards manufacturers, all trying to cut manufacturing cost, generally skimmed on the filtering circuit (cheaper and fewer capacitors) in order to produce a very low cost graphic card.

The TNT2-M64 works fine at lower definitions though. Tony's right about the easy installation and mostly problem-free reliability. If you don't plan to use your display above 800x600, or sometimes 1024x768 depending on the brand, the TNT2-M64 isn't a bad value.

The Radeon 7000 has little better 3D capabilities, although it's nothing spectacular. It is based on a more recent architecture than the TNT2-M64 is. MPEG-2 playback will also be quite a bit better on the ATI. In order not to experience any driver weirdness, one has to remember to uninstall the original driver BEFORE installing the newer one (the CATALYST works fine for the Radeon 7000 and more recent ATI cards). If older driver isn't uninstalled (ie - if user/technician hasn't read ATI's how-to guide), you might experience drivers weirdness. ATI's drivers aren't the Detonators and therefore, one must not blindly play with them the same way.

Neither the Radeon 7000 or the TNT2-M64 are good choices if you plan to stay in front of your screen for extended hours if the definition is set above 1280x1024.

 

[Tea]

Exactly. Weirdness. You can't give one to a customer who might ever play with the system unless he's an expert. Plus the default install routines that load useless crap into your startup. Plus having to find the exact right driver and if you get one that's not completely correct it loads anyway and ztuffz the zystem up. (I think the Imitator Driverz ... er ... zorry, I think they are called the Catalystz ... have fixed that last thing up now. But not before time.)

Merc's talk of locking the system up comes out of dreamland. We've shipped countless hundreds of them, possibly thousandz. Plain nonzenze.

As for picture quality, it's a non-issue with the monitors that people who get $50 video cards buy.

 

[Groltz]

It so happens that today I ran across a small utility that is supposed to flush all traces of video card drivers from one's PC. The utility works on both ATI and Nvidia video drivers and on all Windows OS'es from 95 to XP.

http://www.nvnews.net/index.shtml#1045610680

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=&threadid=7728

.

 

[James]

Thanks Groltz, that's seriously useful.

Now we seem to have a consensus of sorts on the AUD50 range, how about cards in the AUD100-200 range - what's the go there, do y'all think? This is primarily for building budget game systems. At the moment I'm using 8x Geforce 4 MX440s despite my dislike of the crippleware Geforce 4 MXes. I don't know enough about the ATI range and I was wondering what happened to the SiS cards launched with some fanfare a little while ago?

 

[double bit CRC error]

Does anybody really have driver problems going between cards? how are you guys getting this?

I have gone from rageIIc to TNT2 to g400 to TNT 1 to g400 and not a single quirk...

i know i was using newest detonators and matrox drivers... dont know about ATi.... certainly not the catalysts.

 

[Mercutio]

Merc's talk of locking the system up comes out of dreamland. We've shipped countless hundreds of them, possibly thousandz. Plain nonzenze.

I beg to differ. Looking back through my problem logs (I am a diarist by habit. Makes billing easier), I can see 41 times over a three year period where I replaced an nvidia card to solve lockup/ heat related issues or graphics anomalies, usually only after spending some period of time attempting to fix the problem in other ways (adding fans, installing new drivers, changing RAM). 34 of those times, I did not have to re-visit the PC after replacing that card.

Damn near monthly.

These aren't PCs I built. These aren't cards from a single vendor or with a single chip. This is a long-term pattern. I'm sure Tannin's shop DOES see more PCs than I do, but I'm also sure that I've seen a large enough sample on my own to discern a pattern.

If you mean to tell me that 34 times, the fact that I replaced an nvidia card and the fact that a problem serious enough to ask for professional help went away is only a coincidence, I can only suggest that you bang your head against something large and solid, until your senses return to you.

 

[Jake the Dog]

I can only suggest that the issue Merc is having with TNT2 is not related to the card itself rather a mobo, PSU or some other problem that is killing the vid cards.

going by my own experiences and those of our largish MIS dept here at work, the TNT2 M64 is the single most reliable card either of us have used. Tannin has had used them extensively and had no problems either. other than Merc, I've never read or heard of these cards having heat/lockup issues.

has anyone else had consistently bad experiences with TNT2's?

 

[Jake the Dog]

James,

a few places still have GF3 in stock. I just had a quick a scan at the distributors/wholesalers I buy shows they don't have stock anymore but I'm told some of the smaller retailers still will. I'm pretty sure GF3Ti200 can be had for under $200, not sure about the Ti500 though. both GF3's are still faster than the GF4MX's and display superior image quality too.

 

[Mercutio]

I'm not talking about M64s, Vantas or GF2MXs. I'm talking about products across all those that nvidia has developed. What I've seen has ranged from Riva128 to GF4MX.

I don't sit down thinking "Oh, gee, nvidia card, I'd better take that out." I've never done that, although I have been awfully tempted a few times.

Lately I've even recused myself from working on computers with nvidia cards for precisely that reason. I send one of my students to do that work instead.

For James' question: the SiS Xabre is a mediocre, low cost part, much like the Kyro-based boards of 18 months ago. It performs adequately for undemanding users, and I think its primary reason for being is to stuff a lot of texture memory onto a card that the truly ignorant or extremely cheap will buy it.
An ATI 9000 Pro isn't a bad card for gaming, and the VIVO version I wrote about yesterday was still under $200 aussiebucks.

 

[double bit CRC error]

I bought my geforce3 Ti200 when they came out and it was under $200 then... I'm sure you can find it cheaper than that.. oh wait.. you're in Australia... that explains your terribly augmented perspective on computer prices....

Personally, I might get a geforce4MX now... 1) because you can't play directX 9 games very fast on either of them anyway... 2) I prefer openGL games. 3) Geforce4MX's allow simlutaneous TV and VGA out and geforce3 simply doesn't.

From what I've seen a geforce4MX (what is it 440... 460... now?) is comperable to a geforce3 Ti200 and has similar quality 2D/3D.

 

[Cliptin]

If you mean to tell me that 34 times, the fact that I replaced an nvidia card and the fact that a problem serious enough to ask for professional help went away is only a coincidence, I can only suggest that you bang your head against something large and solid, until your senses return to you.

Did you try reseating the cards or anything else that would emulate replacing the card with the exact same card.

As for me I only run Nvidia here at home. I've gone through the TNT, GF2MX, GF2Pro & GF4MX and never had a problem. I even removed the fan from the GF2Pro and used a large heat sink. The GF4MX I have in my game system is overclocked to 340/440 on stock cooling. I've never had driver problems.

In fact the only time I've ever had driver problems was about a month ago at work. Someone had purchased ATI 7000s(?). Sure the card came with a drivers disk but like everything else the drivers available from the web were bound to be more recent right. I ended up having to uninstall the download and use the drivers from the CD. It wasn't worth my time to figure out what the actual probelm was but fro my first time working with ATI products it was memorable. In a bad way.

 

[CougTek]

The Radeon 9100 that Fushigi said to cost 82$ a few week ago is a far better card than any GeFarce 4MX, AGP 8x or not. The Radeon 9100 is a renamed 8500 with a few additional features. Although I haven't seen any 9100-based card sold under the ATI brand name, I know Sapphire makes one (Atlantis 9100). It also has a TV-out and a DVI output, so it's very versatile.

And a GeFarce 4MX doesn't match any GeFarce 3Ti, except for a few CPU-limited games.

 

[James]

Thanks all.

What does "Pro" add to a standard 9100 card, just clock speed or also memory path bandwidth? What's the difference between a 9000 and a 9100?

The Sapphire 9100 Pro 64MB here is $315, a bit expensive. I haven't seen a Sapphire non-Pro yet.

The ATI 9000 64M is $139. The ATI 9000 Pro 64M is $229, the 9000 Pro 128M is $240, the 9000 Pro II 128M (what's that?) is $250. Where is the best price/performance in that little lot? The "Pro" bit adds an extra 70% to the price apparently.

An Auriga 9000 Pro with 128M and VIVO is $299.

64M MX440 cards start at $126.

I tell you, ATI have managed to make their product range more confusing than NVIDIA, and that's quite an achievement.

 

[Jake the Dog]

what about a 9000 pro? are they any good? www.eyo.com.au have them for AUD$192.50

 

[Jake the Dog]

woops, I somehow missed you've already asked about the 9000 pro! well, at least I found a cheap one for you :roll:

 

[Tannin]

Eeek! For some reason, when I try to log on to Storage Forum, Mozilla locks solid! I'm posting this, God help me, with Netscape 4.6 because that's the only other browser I have on this machine.

This TNT thing is a complete mystery to me, Mercutio. We have used hundreds and hundreds of them. Right now, we have in stock ... hang on, I'll go count them ...

6: Crappy 8MB ATI things that don't work. Not genuine ATI and these are absolutely aweful. We bought 20 of them about six months ago and once in a blue moon manage to find a system that one seems to work in. That's ... er ... 12 in service, 6 in stock, one sent off for RMA today and one that we sent off ages ago and they couldn't replace so they gave us a TNT Vanta. ("Yay! A card that works!" we said. )
8: TNT M-64, mostly Sparkles.
17: Gforce II MX-400. 9 ASUS and the rest some no-name brand. Woops - double ordered! By rights we should have 7, not 17. No matter. They will sell.
7: Gforce 4 MX-440, 4 Leadtek, 3 other brand.

Bar the double order on the GF2s, that's pretty normal. Since the wonderful old S3 Trio 64/3D finished up, this is what we have been using. Nvidia for everything. Anything higher-end than the Leadtek GF4MX-440 we buy in to order. We don''t carry stock of Ti4600s and the like. Should give you an idea of how many of these things we move.

I guess we have fixed lock-ip problems in a machine by changing the video card about 50 times in the last 12 months. 48 of those times it was one of those ultra-crap ATI things. Fair dinkum, not counting the ATIs, it would be two, maybe three times in the last year. No more than that.

(Remember that these particular ones are one particular batch from one particular maker - I have not the slightest doubt that most ATIs are immesaurably better. Hell - even those awful 16MB S3 Savage 4s we had a year or so ago were better.)

When we get lock-up problems, we go looking for RAM, CPU temperature, and motherboard, in that order. (Assuming that we have eliminated software, I mean.)

Given that Mercutio is no fool - of which we can be certain - and that he is using fairly similar boards to us (quite often the same boards) how, then, do we explain the difference? Seems to me that the only reasonable explanation is that maybe some of these lock-up machines that we both get could be fixed by changing either the video card or the RAM/motherboard. I'll bear that in mind next time we see one. But it's not all that common, and a lot of the lock-up problems we get coming in are really, really old machines: P-233s and the like.

 

[Tannin]

Forgot to mention. Has anyone had consistently bad experiences with TNTs? Yes! Me!

But this was way, way back. Back when the Vodoo III was king and everything was 333MHz Socket 7 and the TNT-2 was the latest and greatest pile of turd ever. They were bad in a VIA or Intel board, absolutely hopeless in an Ali.

But that was a long, long time ago. Since they got the drivers right - about K6-2/400 days, I think it was - they have been utterly bulletproof.

 

[P5-133XL]

Yes, I had a very bad experiance with a TNT (or was it a TNT2). I got one of the early ones. Specificly I discovered that they drew too much current from the AGP slot causing problems when doing 3D Graphics. I discovered that it was not the fault of the card (It was within AGP specifications) However, before that graphics chipset, nobody was using that much current, so several MB manufacturer's had not designed their boards appropiately creating lockups under stress.

About 6 months after the release, the MB manufactures had corrected the problems. However, if you had a MB manufactured before the correction - You were just plain out of luck. Please note that I carefully reviewed what all the major reviewers were saying at the time and not one mentioned this particular flaw. I really found out after I started having problems and started insisting upon answers.

Nowdays, the power problem won't occur because modern motherboard expect the AGP cards use much more power and some AGP cards even come with their own power connectors. However, if you try to use a modern card in an early P2 MB - Beware.

 

[.Nut]

Eeek! For some reason, when I try to log on to Storage Forum, Mozilla locks solid!...

I just scanned your system over the Internet. It looks like you need to update your ATI Catalyst drivers. :lol:


~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~


Here at work, the departmental operations workstations (graphics boxes) all run Matrox graphics adaptors, basically because we HAVE to. To this day, there aren't any real competitors with Matrox G4x0 or G550 graphics adaptors for 2-D image accuracy as well as pan/zoom speed -- not to mention the drivers + hardware is very very stable. Sure, thee are several cards with great 3-D performance, but that means little in my case.

I rarely perform PC troubleshooting at work, because there are a group of people with that task who are *supposed* to be able to accomplish that task, but once in a great while just can't seem to fix something that's important for some reason. Anyway, once about... er... late-2000, I was asked personally by some "big wigs" to come troubleshoot "a recurring blue screen problem." The computer in question was actually 2-each WinNT 4.0 white box systems, which were dedicated to a non-graphics function. Both were built with seemingly decent components, but both were experiencing BSOD every day or two as they performed their normal functions.

The blue screen message and event logs were pointing to the ATI graphics driver. After updating and then rolling back ATI graphics driver versions, the problem would change greatly. I finally found that the first version (of 3 or 4 versions) of the driver released for this ATI Rage Whatever-It-Was graphics adaptor actually was the most stable version of them all; the newer 3 or 4 versions were demonstrably worse!

Well, to make a long story short, I ended up having to replace these damned ATI Rage graphics adaptors (AGP) because of continued system instability even with the original version of the ATI graphics driver. The next day I simply replaced these ATI graphics adaptors with Matrox G200 (AGP) graphics adaptors, including cleansing the system of all ATI software and installing the most recent Matrox drivers. The BSOD problem completely went away and has not resurfaced to this day.

I had not experienced instability with ATI graphics products up until that point -- with the exception of ATI's Crystal Fonts way back in the early 1990s. I believe I had used an ATI XL model of AGP graphics adaptor around 1997 or '98 without problem in various utilitarian boxes and servers. Since then, I have read about what seems to be MASSIVE numbers of reports about instability woes with ATI graphics adaptors, though people have told me that this is now something in the past.

 

[blakerwry]

i agree that ATI has gotten things right with their radeon series... but the really don't seem to support anything they make that doesnt have "Radeon" slapped on the side....

On a side note, I reinstalled XP w/ SP1 slipstreamed into it... and for the 1st time in about 4 incarnations of win2k and 3 of XP ATi's TV wonder drivers finally installed correctly on the 1st (actually second) try....

what's even more amazing is this is that the software actually seems to work now.... that's a total shock to me... I ahd given up on ATi's software and had been using dscaler...

 

[Tannin]

I just scanned your system over the Internet. It looks like you need to update your ATI Catalyst drivers. :lol:

Funny that. My machines all run Matrox video adaptors. Either that or Matrox. Or some of them have Matrox cards. Maybe that's my problem - running the ATI Catalyst Windows drivers on my Matrox cards. Damn fine operating system, OS/2 - I have 16.7 million colours at 1280 x 1024 and it seems that I'm running a Windows driver for an ATI card on an ECS system with a G-450! Now that is what I call compatibility!