Reccomendations for a video card

[Anticheese]

It may seem like a strange request on a Roguelike forum, But I need a bit of advice on picking my next video card.

Currently I'm using a Radeon 9200 (256 mb) and its pretty much about to die, so I need a few reccomendations on what to buy next.

The only criteria is that it has to be at least 256MB, reasonabaly priced and will run Quake 4.

Cheers!

[Sabin Stargem]

First off, is your curent card AGP or PCIe?  Probably the former, but it is important to know since there has been a relatively recent transition to an new standard for videocards.  Here is the difference, and why it is important.
Apparantly, AGPx8 was the standard for the latest videocards, but it is no longer the case due to the PCI Express standard, which has double the data-pipes (x16).  This means that cards that are natively PCIe would be able to achieve quality and speeds greater than that of AGPx8 cards.  However, your motherboard either supports AGP, or PCIe.  As such, that will narrow your options.

Mind you, I am not an authority nor expert on this subject.  I only brought up the topic of AGP and PCIe to prevent any unfortunate mix-ups that could result in wasted money, due to incompatible motherboards or cards.  Hopefully this helps.

[macksting]

...
Gorram it. And here I thought my board was modern enough.

[Drakeson]

If you have PCIe and a reasonably new mother board (could be cheeper to buy a new one anyway) you can put in two mid-low range PCIe cards and SLI it up to get twice the gogo. High end card $600-1200 motherboard capable of this $150-300 two cards $200-600. Of course you could use two high end cards with this setup but how fast do you really want to go? By the time you need that kind of speed your whole pc will be outmode anyway.

Just make sure your new motherboard is compatible with your old CPU or there's another $100-600. Of course if you don't have a SATAII RAID compatible mother board then you could get that too... but then there's new hard drives $120 should do for a matched pair of 80gig. The performance is fantastic but if you're not carefull you'll end up with vapor phase cooling and a creditcard debt.

[macksting]

What's SLI?
What's SATA II RAID? I really should know what RAID is, but the SATAII has lost me entirely.
What, precisely, is "vapor phase cooling?" I assume it's naught but comedic gold that I'm missing out on. Is it the same as letting the magical blue smoke out?

[Drakeson]

vapor phase cooling is using an aircon compressor to cool your cpu in massively over clocked machines (overclocking is pushing your cpu beyond it's design peramiters) it's just crazy. SATA is the latest type of hard drive, Don't know what it stands for, Serial ATA is as far as I go. It's just got a faster transfer rate than the old ribbon drives (PATA) and SATAII has twice again what SATA has. The only problem with SATAII is that hard drives just can't put out the info that fast (3 Gig/sec) which is where RAID drives come in. A RAID drive is a bunch of drives which are joined togeather to make one virtual drive, wiki can tell you more. RAID reads info from more than one drive at once to speed up transfer rates, so 3 gig/sec is actually used. Wiki has a great explanation of RAID.

The smoke MUST stay in the wires, the soldering iron put it in there to do the work and if it gets out then you have to re fill it. Oh and the smoke sends you blind sterile and ugly, just like everything else that's fun.

[macksting]

So that's why they use those triple drives and parity and all that for data integrity. Because they can read a file from all three at once for a faster transfer rate!
... and that's why RAID is part of the name of that. Okay. So now I know what RAID is.

As regards overclocking:
Project E.U.N.U.C.H.

[Joseph Hewitt]

That's funny. When I started university back in 92 one of my friends had a self-modified memory-expanded air-cooled Commodore 64 with a hard drive. He used this as his main computer because, he said, it could do everything he needed.

[macksting]

Well, the C64 did have tape drives and modems. Betcha it could even be modified to take input by CB. A setup like that could play Dark Side like a C128!
Back then, what else did you need?

[Reaver]

I'd like to add, Anticheese, that you'd be best off looking at an Nvidia <Glide, FX5200.>AGP 8x card. Cheap on trademe, work like hells, and you don't have PCIE 16.

Comes in 256 I'm sure, and I think it might come in 512.

[Drakeson]

always check with a 512 card that the clock has not been held back. Currently there is no reason for 512 meg in a graphics card as the GPU can NOT push the data out any faster, some cards are even slower because they put limiters in (I don't know why). Save your money and get the 256.

[Reaver]

That and 512 to be fully used - <Some of them have decent GPU's, actually, that are capable of reaching all the speed ranges.> - requires a mecca cache. We're talking 2mb/4mb total, a duo recommended to allow the processor to also use the information being fed at an ok speed.

Hyperthreading is, as always, a must.