which card?

[juliendogg]

okay, i'm visiting my brother out of state and he wants to speed up his system a little. it's an old gateway pII 233. i dropped in a 256 mg pc133 chip and managed to overclock the old pos pII up to 280 w\fsb at 80. not half bad i think its nice and stable with sandra burn in. thing is his b-day is this weekend and i was gonna get him a vid card to put in it. he's gonna upgrade eventually to an amd system but for now its just this 233. so it won't need much video power or it would just be wasted. geforce 2 maybe? or maybe an older radeon 32? tv-out would be a plus but not necessary. i'm thinking nvidia cuz he won't be able to do much tweaking with the drivers and i won't be around to help.
waddya think? any input would be appreciated.....

[funnyperson1]

somehow i doubt that he has an agp slot, so i would say a RadeonSDR PCI (havent heard of too many good Nvidia PCI cards) for aourn 60$....but if he has an agp slot get him a Radeon32mbDDR or a geforce2GTS for around 65$ (get the radeon if he actually thinks that 2D is important....most people do, though the geforce is a bit faster...)

[juliendogg]

believe it or not he actually does have an agp slot. even more surprising to me was that the graphics weren't onboard. being that it's an old gateway i was expecting to have to disable onboard graphics and get a pci card. but it's got agp and currently using a riva tnt 4 meg card. pos. thanx for the tip i was thinking of the gts and the price is right. how are the drivers for the older radeons. are they smoothed out? my 8500 runs great but a little over the 60 or 75 i wanna spend on his *L*

[CrystalMethod]

You could probably pick up a TnT2 16 meg card pretty cheap. Does 3D, but not really good for serious gaming. If he's upgrading soon anyways, I'd go with a 16 meg card.

[Yodums]

Probably the Radeon 32DDR.

It's a good all around card and it'll support him in the next machine since guessing hes no hardcore gamer.

[juliendogg]

no, not a hardcore gamer but he'd like to be able to play a some games on the pc since they've quit making them for his dreamcast. anyway. the point is that i'd like the card to be decent in a t-bird system as well. so when he does upgrade mobo and proc he won't have to have shell out for a new card. definately at least 32 meg of ram. think the radeon is stable enough with the new drivers for an inexperienced user? guess i'll have time to get it running good for him before i head back up north....

[juliendogg]

bump

[funnyperson1]

the drivers for the older radeons are pretty good as far as i have heard, and if hes using win98 the radeon32mbDDR is about on par with a GTS at 1024 and higher.....