I live in shame.....this is absolutely horrible.....

[Shadow ÒÓ]

as you all know (and those of you who don't just look at my sig) I'm a huge VooDoo fan. I LOVE my 5500. Well it seems there are some bigger fans of the 5500 than I as one of them approached me with an offer to trade me a Gforce 2 32meg DDR memory card (w TV out) for mine. Not anxious I priced his card. $170 locally. Considering I've had my 5500 for some time, and his was brand new I had to entertain the idea. I paid about $200 for my VooDoo.......and it's now selling for well below $100. IF I could get current market price, I'd lose over $100. However since he's offered me a (roughly) $170 card, I'm only losing $30.

Yip.....I took it.........CYA VooDoo! Now how do I tweak this sucker! =)

*edit* after reading a few other posts, I ripped the heat sink off to see what it says. Gforce 2 GTS Pro. That help any?

*edit again* after a bit more reading, I'm not at all confident this is such a good trade. I thought the big thing was to get ANY Gforce 2 that had DDR memory. (yes I understand it's not a 64 meg card) I'm beginning to spiral in depression as I may have traded my favorite card (which btw seems to be the best UT card, which is also my FAVORITE game) for a card of lesser quality?

Granted the card is probably $40 cheaper on pricewatch, (havn't checked) but someone PLEASE tell me it was at least an even trade?

 

[Placid]

In my opinion you got a even trade.
The graphics quality of the voodoo is better but the frame rates of the geforce3 gts pro are better in d3d.
The voodoo was made for open gl and geforce is made for d3d.
If 3dfx had not gone out of business the voodoo card would not currently be so cheap.
After all not many people are willing to buy video card when driver and hardware updates for future os and games is unkown.
Sleep well

 

[Justy303]

I think it was a good trade!!

 

[William]

Shadow I think you got a great deal. I know your a big Voodoo fan but Nvidia did hire a bunch of the 3dfx guys, so you know you got a quality GPU!

 

[[OC]_SR20DE]

Hi Shadow ; )

Yeah I think you had pretty good trade. Just be sure if you got a GeForce2 Pro rather than GeForce2 GTS. The Pro one is quite better.. has faster memory speed, higher default RAM speed than the GTS so you can overclock it higher :* GTS is very nice too but hope it's a Pro... Also, you're not losing any performance from 64mb to a 32mb ram on the GF2. GF2 32mg often outperformes 64mb version in games at resolutions upto 1024x768x32bit. Maybe in the 1600x1200 range and Up, the 64mb will just barely be better than the 32mb that you will not be able to tell the difference.

 

[jeff_harrison_344]

Shadow
NNNNNoooooooooooo!


Ah well I still love my V5 and am never gonna trade it! (Dont keep me up on that offer )

 

[UnseenMenace]

You lucky lucky man..
I would much rather have that card than a voodoo

Easiest way to tweak it is to download NVmax from http://tweakfiles.com
and if your handy with a soldering iron.. theres a hardware modification on http://tweakhardware.com to make it display as a Quadro card

 

[AKDUDE]

So tell us Shadow, which one LOOKS better?
AKDUDE

 

[KILLorBE]

UnseenMenace (Jun 15, 2001 07:46 a.m.):
Easiest way to tweak it is to download NVmax

OR:
To enable the overclocking, you should create the following section in the registry:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\NVIDIA Corporation\Global\NVTweak
and introduce a parameter of DWORD type named CoolBits and equal to 3. After that you will get access to "Hardware" properties page in the driver settings. Now you should enable "Allow clock frequency adjustments" to be able to set the frequencies equal to over-nominal values and reboot the system.

 

[Shadow ÒÓ]

Whelp.......I'm a little disappointed.

Stock 933 with 256 CAS 2 memory running 2K server scored 1550 in 3D Mark on my 5500.

I stuck the GTS in a newly formatted machine running a 933 w/128 megs of CAS 2 memory running 98SE. It scored 2374. Both boards have VIA chips and I enabled interleave on the 98 machine and ran the test again. The score dropped to 2288. I'll try the card in my machine today.

What I'm disappointed in is the fact that the GTS actually looked worse on the benchmarks. More rips and white pixels (almost as if it were clocked too high) by far than the VooDoo card. Now I'm not being bias here, even my girlfriend could see a difference as I ran both tests at the same time on both machines next to each other.

Open for comments here, and I'll post the results of the card in my machine later today.

I also expected to see higher scores from the GTS as it's running on 98 and it's the only thing installed on the machine.

 

[jeff_harrison_344]

So now youve come ccraaaawwwwliiinnn back eh?

 

[Shadow ÒÓ]

ROFL.......well.........If I'm not satisfied, I'll definitly go buy another 5500. Especially since UT likes Glide better than NVidia's version.

 

[jeff_harrison_344]

Thats my boy!

I seriously LOVE my 5500, I will never trade it!
Well youll be happy when you see that nice long card again, with that nice white power connector, and those 2 beutiful AAVID fans.........Trust me

 

[batboy]

Shadow, some of the later GTS cards had Pro chips. Also, what version drivers are you using. I have found that the newer detonator drivers give the best performance and best image quality. Driver support for Voodoo cards are drying up, but nVida support for the GF2 is still going strong.

 

[Shadow ÒÓ]

That's where I'm getting confused........the chip says GForce2 GTS but on top near the NVidia logo it has PRO written sideways. It does have 32 megs DDR memory tho....so you tell me? is it the GTS/Pro like the Device manager shows? "NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS/GeForce2 Pro"


where do I find the version number of the drivers?

 

[jeff_harrison_344]

The device manager shows GTS/Pro because the driver was written for either of those cards. Its like the Voodoo drivers. On all of the newer Voodoo 4/5 drivers, it doesnt say Voodoo5, it says Voodoo Series.

 

[AKDUDE]

Shadow, be different, try a Radeon.
AKDUDE

 

[jeff_harrison_344]

My friend has a Radeon 64DDR ViVo. It is pretty good, but one of the drawbacks of it is that the FSAA on it is horrible.


(Woohoo, 500th post and 4th star)

 

[OpenFriday]

AKDUDE (Jun 17, 2001 02:53 p.m.):
Shadow, be different, try a Radeon.
AKDUDE

I agree, now someone just has to get Shadow off the intel bandwagon......

 

[batboy]

If you have Sandra, use the Video System Information module to check. Under drivers, the version should be the last 4 digits. What brand is your vid card? Another way is to go to your desktop, right click with your mouse to pop up a menu, select properties, click on the settings tab, click on the advance button in the lower right of the window, select the top tab for your vid card (mine says GeForce MX/MX 400), and just look at the driver vesions that show up . Now if you click on the additional properties button near the bottom, that will get you into card's properties settings area where most of the GeForce tweaking is done, including overclocking it. Look to see what the default settings are for the core and the memory under the clock frequecies tab. Then find out what the specs are for that brand card. That should positively tell you if you have a GTS or a Pro. GeForce is definitely the way to go right now, and hopefully you did get a Pro card. If so, you got a great deal.