Graphics card advice

Here is a Matrox Millennium G550 Dual-Head Video Card, AGP, 32 megs of ram

http://cgi.ebay.ca …6730&rd=1&ssPag​eName=WDVW

only 30 bucks. not bad

I'm a Apple (Mac G4) user so there's a lot in your post that's in a foreign language to me...but AGP cards are Cross Platform.

I'm using a ATI Radeon 9000. It can drive either a flat panel or a CRT and has 128 MB for each, for a total of 256 MB. I'm using a Apple Cinema Display, the "small" one; "small in quotation marks. None of the Cinema displays are actually "small"

I have been led to understand that the card is a bit of overkill, that I could have gotten away with 64 MB but I'm not sure about that... However the card easily drives the Cinema display at 1600 x 1000 resolution and 32 bit color. And of course the card was reduced in price, having been replaced by an even larger card. (I got the card from Other World Computing, which is primarily Mac oriented. But they do have closeouts so it's a good place to look for cross platform stuff. Again, a good outfit! I'm using one of their House Brand (Mercury) accelerator cards, having just taken my 786 MHz mac out to 1.47 GHz. It took longer to read the instructions than to do the switch!)

The Apple Cinema is without doubt the best display I've ever used! It's expensive but well worth it if you edit photographs. It is totally unforgiving and because it has a different aspect ratio, wider than high, it's easier to work with.

Again, I use Mac but the rules never change. You cannot have too much RAM! I'm running 3 Gigs, the max at times I'd like more... (Go to 18004MEMORY for your memory. I've used them for years and never had any problem with their product or service. I'm also using one of their cards in my camera).

From my perspective, since the speed of the hard drives and all that is only relevant when you're loading data into RAM, I always put my money toward more Ram and treat the HDD as a poor relation. Depending of course, I use Adobe's Elements 3 (with some added plug ins) and Noise Ninja. Sometimes a file might be running at 50 Meg or more. With my sloppy work habits, I'll have several open at once. I've got a Scratch Disc, a separate HDD, but that only kicks in when I've used up a gig of RAM.

k

some thing's

1. No, you can not use PCI cards in a PCIe slot
2. Matrox no longer really has the "2D" market but the nuts like it did, any ati or nvidia card will give you the same performance and you can get it in PCIe, i think most people if you sat them down in front of 2 comps and asked which was what, they wouldnt know.
3. 256mb of ram wont matter since your apps dont use the video card at all
4. you can get low end PCIe cards and i SUGGEST you get a mobo with a PCIe slot - AGP is "dead", why buy dead technology.
5. Get a card with DVI for an LCD.
6. Buy soc ket AM2, 939 is also more or less a "dieing" technology, AM2 is not much more, if at all, expensice as a socket 939 system.

SATA drives are almost the same price these days as IDE, also less messy cables to deal with, and the newer SATA seagte 7200.10 drives perform better then any IDE drives out there, you could even consider a 74G raptor 10k RPM SATA drive if you want some real speed.

if the card has 256mb of ram it does not split the ram to 128mb to each monitor, video ram is used to cache textures and other items, more so in 3D mode, that card isnt powerful enough to ever use 256mb of ram basically, but it will do fine for any 2D applications and such.


I am checking out those matrox links, and i will stick to, sit you down in front of 2 identical system, except the vid card, and you wont be able to tell.

Lastly, have you considered AMD dual core solutions, since they have DROPPED madly in price... i think their cheapest one is $150 ?

AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core Processor 3800+ Socket AM2 - $150 US
http://www.zipzoomfly.​com …l.jsp?ProductCo​de=80721-8

What is your budget ?

P.S - shop www.zipzoomfly.com - less price gouging then newegg.com and free Fedex 3 day shipping on most everything. (or add 2 day for $1.99)

Spec'd out this system:


AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core Processor 3800+ Socket AM2 (89W) Retail ***Free Shipping***

Asus M2N-E nForce 570 Ultra Sempron/Athlon 64(FX)(X2) SktAM2 DDR2 ATX Motherboard w/Audio, Gigabit LAN, RAID/Serial ATA Retail ***Free Shipping***

Corsair TWIN2X1024A-6400 1GB Kit DDR2-800 XMS2-6400 Xtreme Performance Memory

XFX GeForce 6500 PCI Express 128MB

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3200820AS 200GB Serial ATA

Subtotal: $518.38

subtract $80 if you dont want the harddrive.


everything has free 3 day shipping as well. Toss in another $100 for a new case and decent power supply and you have a system that would kick the crap out of the one you speced out.

He did spec his out in April 2005 tho

That is a useful list of gear tho'. Wish I'd had that when I spec'd out mine last week Would have saved me a lot of time.

ahahahah!


i guess i should of noticed that..LOL just saw the post figured it was new.

sorry condyk i didnt do that in your post

do you still have warrenty on your cpu ? see if you can send it back and change for a x2 ?

It is a x2

well in that case, you must be enjoying it

Ah my friend ... 'tis not yet built. I am awaiting arrival of the case. Hoping it is here today sometime so I can do it on Saturday. Maybe the extra memery and vid card will be here today as well, tho' more likely Monday. Looking forward to loading up my first big TIFF's in CS2

All this talk about cheap video cards makes we want to stop gaming. I was on the edge of buying a $300 plus vid card not too long ago. I mostly have stopped playing since spending all my time with CS2

i still game, why i got a $340 vid card at the time x1900 XT and i love ittttttttttt