M
Me
Guest
My first expensive video card i bought which was alittle over 2 years ago which was a AGP Voodoo 3 for $150. I recently decided to upgrade my video card to a geforce based card since everyone seems to have one and talk about how great they are. Well I went to Best Buy a computer store which offers a 30 day refund policy on video card and bought one. I purchased the PNY geforce 2 GTS PRO 64meg DDR for $185+tax which has a 201/401 core. I had major problems with the card when i first installed it because of the conflicting drivers with my 3dfx card. I eventually reinstalled windows 98se and everything worked fine. I then went and overclocked it to 447/238 with minor artifacts when playing 3dgames. Compared to my voodoo 3 was pretty good at 32 bit and it did pull off some good frame rates but nothing spectacular to my voodoo 3 16meg card. I was getting around 65fps averege in most games at 32 bit color with the geforce and i was getting the same already with my voodoo 3 card at 16bit color. After my 26 days of playing Unreal T , Elite Force, Counterstrike and quake 3 i thought to myself that this card aint worth the performance for the price. I brought it back and purchased a soundblaster 5.1 lIve card for 69+tax on sale in my area. Anyway went home and installed my old voodoo 3 and overclocked it to 197mhz from 166mhz. I then installed the soundblaster 5.1 card and removed my old ISA soundblaster awe 64 which i bought about 3 years ago. I went back and started playing some counterstrike and unreal and everything was just as fast or faster i.e unreal T but was not as colorful as the geforce card. To tell you the truth i couldnt barely tell the difference in colors and no i dont wear glasses! The soundblaster 5.1 is sooo much better then my last card when it comes to MP3's or games and actually made my computer a bit faster in games because of running off the pci instead of the ISA. I forgot to add that i previously also bought and returned the Kyro 2 4500 and all i have to say is that card sucks. In 3dmark2000 i only get 3550 with the voodoo 3 and the kyro got 4500 and my gts pro got 5900 running on 2x with the new drivers. I think anyone looking to upgrade from a mx card or voodoo 3 card should wait until the geforce2 ultra or geforce 3 goes down in price. I might just wait for the Geforce 3 mx or even buy myself the voodoo 5500 if it comes down to 75+shipping. Other than that i dont think it is worth the money to upgrade to a better video card for myself anyway ,however when those new games come out that need the geforce 3 specs yeah im definitly going to buy a new video card then.