what's a good card

hi, i'd like to know what would be a good video card to use with my system. i've had some problems when i overclock and the blue screen points to the video drivers. yes i know it's a cheap card. any suggestions for an all around good card that will work with ddr and overclocking. a list of my system is at the bottom. thank you.

a good card

I'd recommend an ATI Radeon 8500, retail version. They're about $150 from an online vendor such as Newegg.com. 8500's are loaded with features, come with a nice package of games, and give top-notch performance.

Another nice version of the 8500 is the Gigabyte Maya 8500LE. It's a few dollars less than the retail ATI card, but comes with big heatsinks and hardware-monitoring. It's clocked a little slower and won't OC quite as high as the retail cards can though. But the difference is marginal.

On the nvidia side... A geforce 3 Ti 200 is a good value... a little less $ than an 8500, and a little less performace too. Gainward, Leadtek, Visiontek, and Abit make some of the highest quality Geforce cards.

The Geforce 4 Ti's stand at the top of gamer graphics, and carry the price tag to prove it. But a lower-end Geforce 4 Ti such as a 4200 might be a good buy for around $180.

In the $100 range- geforce 2 Ti's, Radeon 7500's, and Geforce 4 440/460 MX's all rank about the same in speed. The 7500 has superior TV-out, as well as a DVI connection, and superb image quality.

Hope some of this helps you make a decision. Whta's your price range, btw?

What variety of card would work well with an older BX board?

I've currently got a GF2 GTS, I'm wondering if there's any performance gain to be had by upgrading the video card, or if the fact I'm still using SDRAM is going to ultimately bottleneck performance long before the vid card is maxed out--

Unsure which combination I've currently got set up would make a difference or not-

PIII 700e@933 (1.8v)
256 MB SDRAM (Infineon 2-2-2)
Abit BX6 rv2
Asus 7700 Deluxe 32mb GTS

PIII 550e@733 (1.65v)
256 MB SDRAM (Crucial 2-2-2)
MSI BX Master
V3 2000 PCI

Thanx

I was all set to buy an 8500, but after seeing the benchmarks from the Geforce4 TI4200 and seeing the price i simply must have one. Plus you have the bragging rights of "i have a geforce 4"

I just bought the Radeon 8500 from newegg and it runs great - i get around 90-100 fps in Quake 3 and i'm only runng a P3 450 (until thursday ) i would defenatly go with the radeon- the geforce 4 has lots o' bragging rights- but it also has a heafty price tag!

I'm likely to stick with nvidia, mostly because they appear to have a much more stable driver base than ATI does. 2D performance perhaps gets the nod with ATI, but I've found it to be generally very subjective.

I simply asked because opinions have stated (both in this forum and some others) that the GF4 was really built for the newer chipsets, (i845, i850, i645, etc) and that you could perhaps be wasting your money by going for a 44/4600, that your cpu and memory will bottleneck your performance...something like a measly 55-6000 3dmark2k1 with a tbird/sdram combo? I don't know if something might have been up with the board otherwise, but I suppose if I don't know otherwise, I'll probably either:

*stick with what I've got now

*wait for the newer rdram & p4 boards to come out, along with the northwood b (133) chips.

I'm not likely to hold out for the AMD sector, too many heat issues for me to want to deal with...sure I'm lazy

I would propose a GF3 Ti 200.
It's a very good performer
It can be easily o\c as a Ti 500
It's price has become fair enough