Which Nvidia card should I buy?

[jftuga]

I want to buy a Nvidia card and, if possible, stay in the $120 - $140 range. I am not a gamer and this would be used exclusively on a Gentoo system running Xorg X11 6.8, with transparency enabled ( see: http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_Xorg_X11_and_Tranparency ). I want a dual dvi monitor card.

Any suggestions: which card, where to buy, etc??

Thanks,
-John

[Genone]

Personally I'd go for the 6600 GT, but that's a little beyound your price range. Are you going for an AGP or PCI-Express card?

[jftuga]

I would want an AGP card. I am not sure if ths motherboard supports PCI Express. It is a Gigabyte board with a Athlon 2100XP that I bought a year or two ago and I can not remember them model number of the motherboard either.

-John

[foress_89]

I would have pointed you to some website.. but since your in athens.. lol

[Genone]

Athlon-XP definitely is AGP only, so you can't use the GeForce 6200, so you can't use any model of the whole GeForce 6 series. Too bad that the whole GeForce 5 series is crap.

[yogipsu]

GeForce FX5200. Cheap as hell -- maybe around $40. Check pricewatch.

If you're not a gamer at all, this is the perfect card for you; and even if you dabble, it ran Warcraft 3 for me, under WINE, at 1284x1024-32 with all settings maxed out without a hiccup.

Works flawlessly with XOrg and the nvidia binary drivers.

[placeholder]

Athlon-XP definitely is AGP only, so you can't use the GeForce 6200, so you can't use any model of the whole GeForce 6 series. Too bad that the whole GeForce 5 series is crap.

I think that the one good card that existed in that series was the 5800XT.

*-- For original poster --*
MSI nVidia Geforce 5800XT

I plan on getting that soon, but I am a gamer so the 5200 would probably suffice for you just fine.

[yogipsu]

I am not a gamer and this would be used exclusively on a Gentoo system running Xorg X11 6.8, with transparency enabled ...

No need to spend $200 on a card, then.

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDe ... 040&depa=0

Almost $150 cheaper and it'll do the job fine.

[HolyCoitus]

Asus has a 5200 version for 105 dollars that includes dual DVI, but I don't know where you would find it in stock.
http://usa.asus.com/products/vga/v9520vs/overview.htm

Try Newegg so you can get an idea of what is out there with their search. You can go through cards with dual DVI and get all the info about them there. They are sold out of the Asus card though.
http://www.newegg.com/app/manufact.asp? ... =48&DEPA=0\

Good luck on finding something that works for you.

[ewan.paton]

if you really ar not a gamer and dont mind not having directx 9 support then you can go on ebay and get geforce 4 4600ti's for about £40, these were top of the line well made/cooled and will beat most nvidia cards up to 5700s i am swaping some stuff with a mate to get one with video in/out

edit i should clarify geforce 4s will probably play doom3 quite well but certain windows games are optimised for directx9 cards a geforce 4 will leave a 5200 behind faster than the roadrunner in cartoons as would a 4200 or 4400 the only thing the 5 series did was add directx suport as far as i can see and these were £300 cards

[Nicom]

A 5200 should be more than enough for your system, any higher and you'd need to upgrade your CPU and start gaming

[Hauser]

Mine cost a little less than $100, and I'm quite satisfied with it.

[eeknay]

buy yourself a GF4-4200-Ti. I have this card running Doom³ @ 1024x768 max details about 50fps.
HL2 also works fine with high details and 1024x768 @ about 60fps

besides that i only have a 1200mhz cpu...but i think having 1gb ram does make the difference. Friend of mine has a xp3000+ with some radeon card, but it's not running hl2 as fast as mine.

[Nicom]

buy yourself a GF4-4200-Ti. I have this card running Doom³ @ 1024x768 max details about 50fps.
HL2 also works fine with high details and 1024x768 @ about 60fps

besides that i only have a 1200mhz cpu...but i think having 1gb ram does make the difference. Friend of mine has a xp3000+ with some radeon card, but it's not running hl2 as fast as mine.

My 5200 gets 14-27 fps in doom3, at medium/800x600, on an athlon64 3200 . I don't see too many GF4 Ti's for sale anywhere, guess I know why now. Gotta get me a 6600 before I go mad!

[ewan.paton]

buy yourself a GF4-4200-Ti. I have this card running Doom³ @ 1024x768 max details about 50fps.
HL2 also works fine with high details and 1024x768 @ about 60fps

besides that i only have a 1200mhz cpu...but i think having 1gb ram does make the difference. Friend of mine has a xp3000+ with some radeon card, but it's not running hl2 as fast as mine.

yay for me, im getting a 4800ti back from my mate in a few days, i guess thats the reason they were still for sale at £140 till the 6000 series was introduced , i want to see what ill get when i plug it into an amd64 overclocked to 2470mhz

theres always a few kicking about on ebay and after everyone gets their christmas presents i would think there should be quite a few, it seems obvious the 5series added nothing but dx9 and probs. eventualy ill probably get a 6series but not till they actually have the mpeg4 video encodeing/decoding properly working as nothing is fast enough to max out doom3 so whats the point adding a few fps

[pandaxiongmao]

GeForce 6800 all the way!

[truekaiser]

yea the 5200 sounds right for you. besides it isn't as much as a space hog as the ti 4600.

[nighty]

buy yourself a GF4-4200-Ti. I have this card running Doom³ @ 1024x768 max details about 50fps.
HL2 also works fine with high details and 1024x768 @ about 60fps

besides that i only have a 1200mhz cpu...but i think having 1gb ram does make the difference. Friend of mine has a xp3000+ with some radeon card, but it's not running hl2 as fast as mine.

yay for me, im getting a 4800ti back from my mate in a few days, i guess thats the reason they were still for sale at £140 till the 6000 series was introduced , i want to see what ill get when i plug it into an amd64 overclocked to 2470mhz

theres always a few kicking about on ebay and after everyone gets their christmas presents i would think there should be quite a few, it seems obvious the 5series added nothing but dx9 and probs. eventualy ill probably get a 6series but not till they actually have the mpeg4 video encodeing/decoding properly working as nothing is fast enough to max out doom3 so whats the point adding a few fps

sounds weird to me, i dont think with that cpu and graphics card doom 3 can pass the 25fps, but hey miracles happen.

ur not a gamer so i suggest a midrange card. the low end cards are always too crappy, so a 5200 can have worse performance than a midrange 4xxx. so i suggest you get either a midrange card like the 5700 or 4600. since right now the selling cards are in the 6xxx you shouldnt have much problem getting the above cards cheaper.
you can also wait a little since pci express is making a strong coming into the market. im not suggesting youll buy just card but it will push agp card prices down a little.

[ewan.paton]

sounds weird to me, i dont think with that cpu and graphics card doom 3 can pass the 25fps, but hey miracles happen.

ur not a gamer so i suggest a midrange card. the low end cards are always too crappy, so a 5200 can have worse performance than a midrange 4xxx. so i suggest you get either a midrange card like the 5700 or 4600. since right now the selling cards are in the 6xxx you shouldnt have much problem getting the above cards cheaper.
you can also wait a little since pci express is making a strong coming into the market. im not suggesting youll buy just card but it will push agp card prices down a little.

you would be surprised, my mate has been playing doom3 on a 1ghz duron with a radeon9200se while i forund it perfectly playable at 800x640 on a pci radeon9000pro athough it was siting in a xeon rig at the time

[aethyr]

eventualy ill probably get a 6series but not till they actually have the mpeg4 video encodeing/decoding properly working as nothing is fast enough to max out doom3 so whats the point adding a few fps

You do realize that feature won't work on linux, even after they get it working in windows? If you use Windows though, then it might affect you. Even the MPEG2 (DVD) acceleration, which is present on pretty much all nvidia cards newer than GeForce 4 (heck, maybe even before that) doesn't work unless you're using the XvMC support in xine or mplayer.

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/archive ... 31813.html

[ewan.paton]

You do realize that feature won't work on linux, even after they get it working in windows? If you use Windows though, then it might affect you. Even the MPEG2 (DVD) acceleration, which is present on pretty much all nvidia cards newer than GeForce 4 (heck, maybe even before that) doesn't work unless you're using the XvMC support in xine or mplayer.

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/archive ... 31813.html

oh balls, well i guess i have no reason to upgrade till cards get a lot cheaper since theirs no real reason to upgrade, cheers for the link though now ill probably just put the money away till dule core ams64s are out

[hds]

GeForce FX5200. Cheap as hell -- maybe around $40. Check pricewatch.

hi there!
well, my old gforce2 gave up today. at boot it sayed something about 0.4MB memory onboard instead of 32MB
so i guess the RAM went down the drain. well, i bought a MSI FX5200LE with 128MB RAm now (66 euros), and glxgears (default window size if you start glxgears) reports about 1700fps. now.. a few questions, since you seem to have the same card:

1) if i call nvidia-settings, X restarts. i guess this is infact my old settings. could you post your nvidia relevant options from your xorg.conf file?

2) is the fps rate OK? what do you get out? well, i was used to 250fps with my gforce2 <g>, so of cause i would like to gain the most possible speed now.

3) my systemboard is only cabable of doing AGP 4X. would this be possible to increase with a BIOS upgrade? it is an EPOX 8KTA with an athlon tbird.

any hints welcome, thx!

[ewan.paton]

sounds weird to me, i dont think with that cpu and graphics card doom 3 can pass the 25fps, but hey miracles happen.

ur not a gamer so i suggest a midrange card. the low end cards are always too crappy, so a 5200 can have worse performance than a midrange 4xxx. so i suggest you get either a midrange card like the 5700 or 4600. since right now the selling cards are in the 6xxx you shouldnt have much problem getting the above cards cheaper.
you can also wait a little since pci express is making a strong coming into the market. im not suggesting youll buy just card but it will push agp card prices down a little.

you would be surprised, my mate has been playing doom3 on a 1ghz duron with a radeon9200se while i forund it perfectly playable at 800x640 on a pci radeon9000pro athough it was siting in a xeon rig at the time

just to confirm i had a geforce 4800se and i got 60fps in doom3 at 800x600 high detail, didnt have time to check higher rez

[Insanity5902]

i have this card
http://www.xfxforce.com/product_view.php?sku=PVT36FND

i like it a lot, and will probably buy all future cards from xfx, it was a sound cad, that i used for gaming in my windows machine. The dual DVI was very nice. If you go to their prodcut page, they acutally have quite a bit of g-cards with dual dvi now.

[MaxDamage]

I finally sold my Radeon 9600 and bought a GeforceFX 5700LE 256Mb. Was only 104¤, and performs very good on Linux.
I just finished today Doom 3 at ultra quality and I really enjoyed it.