OK. I know this isn't a tech forum, but... (PC video card question)

there seem to be alot of computer saavy folks in here and I have a question for my kindred geeks <-- term used lovingly. Here goes:

I got some cash for Christmas and was looking to upgrade my video card. Now I face the dilemma of the ages: ATI or NVIDIA?

Here's the criteria that I will use to frame my question.
1) Price: under $200
2) Memory: I'd like something on the order of 128 MB, but I'm not rigid on that.
3) Dependability: I am dumping my Ti4200 (because its crap!)and want as trouble free video card that I can get on by budget constraints. I am not looking to overclock, just pushing pixels.

I have heard the stories of ATI's sometimes unstable platform. I notice, though, that ATI also has a pretty rabid following that say their card can do no wrong. To this end I was considering the ATI Radeon 9600 Pro 8X AGP 128 MB (or maybe the ASUS iteration?).
On the other side of the coin, I have heard some make the same complaints stated above about NVIDIA cards. I have had 2 GeForce cards. The first, a GeForce 3 was a really nice and reliable card for the system I had at the time. However, the last one I had, a GeForce 4 Ti4200 was poop. But the card may have been bad, or the manufacturer sketchy. I was considering the Asus GeForce 5600 128MB 8X AGP. Critics of this card complained that it was a very "middle of the road" card that is kind of last year (but still made it into one guys top 5 under $200). I also looked at the eVGA GF 5700. I have never heard of this company. Any input?

Thanx

Foamdad

I like Nvidia for this reason.

VIA chipset together in the same box for years. I have not had a problem yet that was caused by this combination.

Jay

and passed through a tri-linear filter?

Sweet!

But its a pain in the ass to open the case up every time you want to move the counters.

Since I'm looking for a similar thing. I tried a search on Half.com - http://half.ebay.com/search/search.jsp?product=computers&keyword=video+cards&meta_id=5&inStock=y and am going to look for something for myself.

Let us know what you find!

My hubby modded his own gaming machine and put a radeon in that.

P.S. what you REALLY want to do is ask The ScreenSavers at the TechTv site:http://techtv.com They know everything there is to know. *g*

I have the mobile version in my laptop, and it kicks ass. ATI has really gotten their act together as far as drivers are concerned. Back in the days of the early Radeons, the drivers sucked; that's when Nvidia was king.

Having tried many of Nvidia's FX series (it took a while before I settled on a Radeon 9800 pro), I think the Radeon 9x00 series provides the best performance. Nvidia, on the other hand, seems to be the most compatible with games. There are a handful of games where Radeon performance sucks, such as Half-Life (weird, huh? Yet Quake III-engine powered games run very well), Strike Fighters: Project One, and Morrowind. However, if your system has a fast processor (My laptop has a P4 3.0 Ghz HT) and lots of memory (1 gig), Morrowind with a Radeon 9600 runs very well.

So, here's the criteria. If your system has a slower processor (along the lines of a P3-933) and slow memory (pc-133), the Radeon cards perform better than the Nvidia cards.

But if you have a newer system (like my laptop) Nvidia and ATI's cards are very close as far as performance goes.

I'd check out the web site Guru3d and read reviews to get a better idea of the performance of whatever card you are interested in.
http://www.guru3d.com

and it's great.

I wanted an ATI, but the Radeon cards are unstable with the chipset of my motherboard (SIS 648).

.

it's ever so slightly unstable under WinXP-- occasionally, the card will glitch, and the system will forget it's installed on reboot, and I'll have to go into safe mode to completely uninstall the drivers and let it reinstall from scratch. It happened this morning, in fact.

Check other options. I won't replace this one with anything remotely similar.