First off,i am having some sluggishness with my viper II 32 meg card.System is an athlon 600/sd11/128 meg pc133 ram.I am probably going to do an all around upgrade,but want to keep it a step or two behind the cutting edge to keep it from getting too pricey.I use the system for a lot of gaming like Baldur's Gate titles,Black and White,Age of Empires II,etc.If i was going to upgrade i was thinking of going to a t-bird 1 gig on an undecided motherboard and extending my ram to 256,but can't decide what video card to go with in this setup.Any comments and help would be greatly appreciated.Ah,and another reason is that pretty much all support for the viper 2 has evaporated of course.

-Devildog

i would recommend an asus a7v+duron 800 and a geforce ddr card for a couple of reasons.

1. asus a7v is a solid mobo with good upgrade potential.
2. duron prices are low and performance is good. you don't NEED a ghz t-bird unless you're going to max out everything. and the prices will come down after a while and you can get what you need.
3. the geforce ddr card is solid and performs adequitely for the price you will pay. i have a leadtek rev. b from sg3d.com and can play all the latest titles at high resolutions with no slowdowns (alice, serious sam, blade of darkness...)

you won't be able to brag that you've got the fastest machine but it'll work with not a lot of investment.

<font color=red>yeah baby, my kung fu's the best...</font color=red>

A Radeon Le is the best buy for the money right now, but for a few dollars more a geforce mx card also makes good sense. If you got the funds and are looking for great performance, then there is little question, get a geforce 2 with 32mb. I am a personal fan of asus motherboards, and their video cards are also reasonably priced with good performance as well. Hope this helps.

The a7v133 is one bad ass board, but you might want to wait for the new ddr version of this chipset, comming out this month or early next month.

Thanks for the help.I was thinking of the asus A7V133 when looking at mobos and the gig t-bird just happens to come as a package deal with it.As far as the video cards i was reading up on posts and reviews and was wondering about the radeon vivo 64ddr and the differences between it and a geforce card of around $200.I took a look at a lot of the top end g-force cards and anything over 200 bucks seems to make me cringe.Thanks for the insight up to this point though.

-Devildog

Semper Fi!!

The radeon 64MB is a waste of money unless you need video out. The 64MB doesn't deliver much of a performance gain over the 32mb. You can pick up a used 32mb radeon card on ebay for about $100 (be careful to avoid "oem" as that usually means radeon le models (which sell for about $80 and not $140). Be careful, but its worth saving the 40-50 dollars over buying a new card. I think the "oem" mislabeling is swindling a lot of fools and that's why when a retail version (the true radeon) is advertised it sells for far less than it should. If you get an asus board it would probably work real well with an asus card i bet. Figure they test those cards on their own motherboards, don't you. The radeon is nice, if dvd is important to you or if your like me and play a lot of 2D video games. The radeon delivers bios vesa mode 3 and unreal acceleration for old school games like Defender, Mortal Kombat, Raiden, etc. Of course these are all emulated games. Check out www.mame.net to re-live the arcade games of the 80s!


If you're coasting, you must be going down hill.