What to look for when buying a graphics card
Mar 11 '00 (Updated Nov 21 '02)
The Bottom Line My final recommendation using this review is no longer valid, please read my new review.
This guide is meant to help you decide what type of graphics card (now referred to as video card) for your computer. In order to to that, a couple questions should be asked before the purchase. Why are you buying a card and what will you be using it for? How important as performance/bragging rights to you? Do you have an idea of what you want? How much are you looking to spend? What kind of computer do you have?
When people ask me, which video card to get, one of the first things I ask them is how much they wish to spend. Given that figure, I start off with the next questions:
Why are you buying a card and what will you be using it for?
Your answer this will vary greatly. It could be for the sake of upgrading, and being tired of not being able to do something your current card can't do now. Reasons that I often anticipate are to play games, to do multimedia activities (video capture/output) and (less frequently) business and higher resolution at a higher quality support.
Playing games will be the lengthiest to answer, so I will tackle the other reasons first. When I think of business applications, I think of Excel worksheets, PowerPoint presentations and what not.
For business and higher resolution at a higher quality support, there is only _ONE_ company that comes to mind: Matrox. Matrox is respected in the computer industry as having THE best 2D quality. Besides respect from other video card companies, I own two Matrox cards and two 3dfx cards, and the Matrox cards are noticeably better. Matrox's latest cards are the Millennium G400 and G400 Max. I have never seen these cards in action myself, but from what I've read, they are excellent cards. Fortunately for consumers (and unfortunately for people trying to pick a card) Matrox has come out with many different flavors of their card: G400, G400 Max,Single Head, Dual Head, 16MB or 32MB... etc.. etc... Now, you may be asking, which card should I get? This is where I would ask how fancy they want the card to be. For a strictly business only environment, I suggest any G400 Single Head card. For people that want to output to TWO monitors (yes, I said two), the Dual Head is suggested. The price difference between these two features is roughly $30USD. In theory, the amount of RAM on the video card shouldn't matter in a business environment but to be on the safe side, 32MB RAM should be sufficient for anything. Average going rate for these cards can range anywhere from $90-$245, depending on where you go. If this is too expensive, you can go for the older cards from Matrox, the Millennium II and Mystique cards which have a slightly lesser quality, but still excellent nonetheless.
For multimedia purposes, I can suggest a little more variety. Some cards that bring this to mind are the 3dfx Voodoo3 3500 TV, the ATI All-In-Wonder 128, and two Matrox solutions, the Matrox Rainbow-Runner DaughterCard, and the Matrox Marvel. Each of these solutions will provide you with the ability to capture from a video source, at which point you can do whatever editing and what not that is desired. Some of these solutions are better than others. Purely from experience, I can say that the ATI All-In-Wonder 128 may be the best solution. It has a capture quality better than the Voodoo3, and is also the cheapest solution (roughly $125USD). The 3dfx Voodoo3 card retails between $165-$200USD. The Matrox Marvel costs more than $265USD, and the Rainbow Runner requires that an existing Matrox card is already installed. I cannot say too much about this since I have not personally explored this area of computers, but I have friends and roommates that _have_ done it, and I have seen the results.
By far the trickiest to answer and truly the driving force of the computer industry is which card do I get to play games? This field has many competitors, but a few stand out above the rest. Before I answer this, I will tell you which card is the absolute best in terms of quality, features and speed: Any GeForce DDR based video card.
Now, given that, you may ask why I said this. Let us first explore the competition. Companies involved in selling "gamer based" cards include 3dfx, ATi, Matrox, ASUS, Leadtek, Diamond Multimedia, Creative Labs and so forth. In this dizzying array of companies, where should you go?
Performance-wise, any video card based on nVidia's GeForce chipset utilizing DDR memory will be a good choice. Key things to remember if you're not technologically savvy but want this card, just mention GeForce and DDR, and hopefully someone can point you in the correct direction.
So why are these other companies also releasing cards as well.... besides making money, they offer many other features. GeForce cards are just plain expensive, currently costing upwards of $285USD. Most of these cards are reference cards, meaning that they are pretty much the same from one company to the next. Solutions by ATi, Matrox and 3dfx are much cheaper.
I will discuss the flagship gaming card for each company, and outline, what I believe, strengths and weaknesses to each.
3dfx: 3dfx has been in the business for a while now, and basically started the whole 3D revolution. Their flagship card is the Voodoo3 3500 TV. This card features the Voodoo3 chipset, 16MB RAM, TV Tuner and multiple video in/out ports. This card is very decent, and outside of gaming, it is a very good overall card, offering many multimedia functions. In terms of game play, it is not the best. The highest color depth (how pretty a game can be) is limited by both the aging technology and the amount of RAM. 16MB RAM is simply not enough for the latest 3D shooters, and the maximum 16-bit color that is produced has banding issues. The average cost for this is between $165-200USD.
ATi: Their best card for gaming is the Rage Fury MAXX. Sporting 64MB of RAM, this is one hefty card. Using two chips instead of one, ATi is effectively creating a "two video card performance" in one video card. At least, that's the goal. Unfortunately, this does not happen, but it does have excellent performance. The 64MB of video ram is misleading, since each chip inside the card requires 32MB independent of each other. This card just doesn't cut it. It is a good card, but just isn't the best. The MSRP on this card is a hefty $299USD.
Matrox: The best gaming card that Matrox is incidentally the card that I recommended earlier for the business application card: G400 MAX. This card is very good. The quality is excellent, at the top of the charts. Unfortunately, this card is not the fastest card in the world. The good news is, it can compete with the second best provided you use their new Turbo GL Drivers and own either an AMD Athlon CPU or an Intel Pentium 3 CPU. The special extensions each CPU has accounts for a minimum of 20% increase in performance for the G400 MAX. The key to gaming is to be sure to get the card with _32_ MB of RAM, not 16MB. This way, gameplay will be much smoother. Average price is about $150USD.
These are the companies that both make their own chipset and the card. All the other companies that I mentioned use chipsets powered either by a Savage chipset or a nVidia chipset (GeForce). Generally, I would not recommend a video card based on a Savage chipset purely because they are not as popular/widespread, which can to less support/compatibility issues.
Companies to look for when buying a GeForce based card: Creative Labs, ASUS, Hercules, Leadtek. Each company is well respected regularly releases drivers for their cards (even the older ones).
Earlier on, I mentioned that a question I asked was what kind of computer you would have. This question encompasses the brand name, age of the computer, cpu speed, amount of memory in the computer already, etc. This is especially important, since the older the computer, the slower the cpu, the less memory available, would require that I change the recommendation.
The company where you bought your computer from is important. I am not aware of what their policies are, but to my knowledge, a company will NOT allow you to open your computer case, otherwise you will void your warranty. This is what I have heard from people who own Dell, Compaq and Gateway computers, but I want to reiterate that I don't really know. Contact your computer maker or the store where you bought it from to find out for sure.
Also, many of the video cards I mentioned earlier are AGP video cards. What this means is that the video card goes into the AGP (accelerated graphics port) on your motherboard (inside your computer case). You need to find out if you have one of these slots or not. Generally speaking, there are three types of slots, ISA, PCI and AGP. ISA slots are much older slots, and are generally colored black. PCI slots are white and AGP slots are brown (you have to open the case to find out... watch those warranties) If you do not have an AGP card, that is okay, there are plenty of PCI solutions available. The one that comes to my mind is the 3dfx Voodoo3 2000 PCI card.
A slow CPU or low amount of RAM will greatly affect your gameplay and no video, no matter how good or expensive, will save a slow computer.
Hopefully I have covered everything that I needed to. I will now leave you with general video card buying tips:
*Buy from a well-known company
-----This is VERY important since a smaller company will generally update
-----its more often -> faster gameplay, better support, new features
*Evaluate what you want from your video card
-----Each card is released with a different end-user in mind. Try to find
-----out what you want from your card, and choose appropriately
*For gamers, ALWAYS try and get the most video ram you can!
-----This is especially important, since more RAM translates to better
-----gaming.
*Ask your friends how they like their card
-----This will give you a personal opinion about the card in question
*Do NOT be dismayed when you find your card being obsolete in 3 months
-----It _will_ happen, which is both good and bad. Good in that companies
-----are releasing better cards, but bad since you don't have the "best".
*Check out hardware review sites on the card you want
-----I do this regularly and a lot of my information comes from these same
-----sites. Try http://www.tomshardware.com for starters.
Please leave any questions or comments at gimlix2@hotmail.com.
I apologize for the lengthy response, but I hope it helps!
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