My old card is funky. I need a new one, but Im missing a few things.

[Jnitrofish]

I need a new card, but I have some questions.

Heres my background story:

I built a PC 1 year and 6 months ago...

Abit KV8 Pro Motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 3200+
512 MB of Kingston PC3200 RAM

...And a VisionTek Radeon 9200se 128mb PCI card, and that’s where it all fell apart.

For the past year and 6 months, I have been dealing with crashes and freezing on a daily basis. I never could figure out why (or I would have done something about it) .

For the past year I had suspected that my video card may had been the problem as that my computer seemed to crash only when I was doing something that involved more graphics than working in Microsoft Notepad, but I was only 40% sure of this (by the way the crash errors gave me no help with troubleshooting) so I had intended to buy a new video card but that never happened. Time went on, while the constant crashes were annoying, I went on with my day as normal (it helped me learn to save my documents every minute, or lose them).

Finally a few days ago, im at my wits end with the crashes, so I launch performing home grown tests to find out what’s causing the problem and research if there is anything I can do to fix it. I tried doing things that would get my computer to crash (happens every time I do it) like playing 3 or 4 videos on screen at the same time, and going to {a web site that has a lot of overlaid images, that’s awesome looking. but im not going to say who because I don’t want to give them the reputation of having the site that crashes my computer }. After performing those same actions over and over again while adjusting settings I finally figured out how to keep my computer from crashing! WOOT! 'bout time after 1 year and 6 months.

Now what I did that kept my computer from crashing is turn off DirectX and DirectDraw accelerations. (And what this effectively did as it seems to me, correct me if im wrong, was force the graphics to be processed not by my ATI GPU but by my AMD Athlon CPU. And that’s what it seems to me (Im not an expert)) Its great that my computer is not crashing but its lagging like hell now trying to keep up because my processor is having to work twice as hard. It can’t even do DVD video in full screen mode.

---Down to new card business---

So now I am going to go buy a new Graphics Card. Im looking at 2 cards mainly. But I don’t know which one to pick. (No ATI for me)

PNY GeForce 6200 / 128MB DDR / AGP 8x / DVI / VGA / TV Out
Link @ TigerDirect.com
Link @ PNY's Web Site

My impression of it:
I am interested in it for the reason that from what I have read in research on it that it will work with OpenGL 2.0. But Im a little worried about it because I have heard some bad things about PNY hardware having problems out of the box. I like it also because I can get it for $39.99 after rebates at TigerDirect.com. And that is my price range of around or below $50 other wise I would get something way better.

-And-

XFX GeForce 6200 / 256MB DDR2 / AGP 8x / DVI / VGA / TV Out
Link @ TigerDirect.com
Link @ XFX's Web Site

My impression of it:
It has more memory (always a good thing). I have heard more good things about it. But I don’t know any thing about XFX, that worries me. Again it’s in my tight price range of around $50 or less. But im not too sure if the card for sale on TigerDirect has this TurboCache thing...

And that brings me to my next questions...

What is TurboCache and why do not seem to want to steer clear of it?
-
And... *a few minutes pass* I had another really good question... It will come to me after a while.

I don’t do much gaming on my computer, but I do play high quality videos like mad. (How else did I figure out that playing 4 videos at the same time crashes my computer )

Anyways help on any of this is appreciated, for doing research for the last 5 days im pretty tired of looking around for some answers. So ill be really glad if you guys can help me make a decision.

-nitro

 

[Jnitrofish]

Im going to sleep on this for tonight, but my gut feeling is to go with the XFX. And the rebate expires pretty soon. So in the morning if I have not heard much back from anyone here. Ill go ahead with my perchase on that.

By the way I want to do the mod to open up more pipelines.

-nitro

 

[ATF 2GTalon]

Do you have any other videocards you can test out in the computer? Have you run memtest or prime to make sure its not anything else like the cpu or ram?

 

[n0aH]

XFX is a good company, and if you want a cheap card the 6200 would do you fine. I would steer clear from tigerdirect, not a good company to deal with and hard to get your MIR

On the other hand eVGA and new egg are both AWSOME companys.

heres a 25mb evga 6200 for 49 bucks
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814130278

 

[Jnitrofish]

Do you have any other videocards you can test out in the computer? Have you run memtest or prime to make sure its not anything else like the cpu or ram?

I have tried to get another card to test in my computer but I have none that are AGP 2.0 or PCI. (I have AGP pro on the rest of the computers). And yes I have runned MemTest on my comuter and everything there was OK.

...I would steer clear from tigerdirect, not a good company to deal with and hard to get your MIR

On the other hand eVGA and new egg are both AWSOME companys.

So I have heard, eVGA has always been my first choise but seemed to be a bit more money. And im not that afraid to try other brands. But I will take into consideration your comment about TigerDirect.

Besides I am sorry to say I am holding off on buying new hardware for now because of a loss in the family last night. But ill be back at it again by this weekend.

Later,
-nitro

 

[Yuriman]

On a card that speed, you will not see any difference between 128MB and 256MB.

 

[pajaa]

In this case, you said, you're playing hi-res-videos like mad, I don't think, the 6200 ist the right card. Well thats certainly complete out of budget, but a x1600 with avivo will take much work from your cpu to the gpu.

I found this one

HIS x1600pro, silent 114$
link@tigerdirect

 

[Burdman27911]

While I agree the x1600 would be a good card with good image quality, there are two things to note. He mentioned he didn't want ATI, and it's a good bit more than what he was going to pay for the 6200 (more than 2x the price).

@Jnitrofish - Just curious, what power supply do you have? Just want to make sure you'll have enough power for a new card, no need to have more random crashes from not having enough power.

 

[Jnitrofish]

@Jnitrofish - Just curious, what power supply do you have? Just want to make sure you'll have enough power for a new card, no need to have more random crashes from not having enough power.

Well I had used my original PSU that came with my case, it was 300 watts. But a few months back I decided to upgrade out of the fear that it could be my PSU that was part of the problem. Now I have a Demon 450 watt PSU.

And to let you all know I went ahead and took n0aH's suggestion and got the eVGA 6200 from Newegg. Ill let you all know how that turns out when it gets here in a few days.

Just for your imformation I do plan on building a new PC one of these days, thats why im not intrested in spending too much money on the computer I have here now. I have other better things to empty my savings account on.

-nitro

Edit: Im thinking, because I have an ATI card now and I am going to be installing a nVidia card that I may have to format and start fresh... ? First time for me to change out an ATI with an nVidia.