Tom's Hardware > Forum > Graphic & Displays > Graphics Cards > Help required
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nimrod   05-02-2001 at 03:38:12 PM

My current system comprises a Pentium II 450 Xeon processor and 256 MB ram. The graphics card is a 16 MB Nvidia TNT AGP card (STB Velocity 4400. Most of the applications I use are MS office products, Adobe photoshop (and related Adobe products). Also play Need for Speed and other games. I am planning to upgrade the graphics card and am not sure which one to choose. I am thinking of getting the ATI Radeon 32MB.

Is this OK for my system and are there any other suggestions? Thanks for your help.

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noko   05-02-2001 at 03:56:55 PM
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I think that is a very good choice because of the Radeons excellent to outstanding 2d with very good 3d game play. A T&L card would be better with your processor then a non T&L card. Plus the strong hardware support for DVD play in the Radeon you won't have any problems watchin a DVD, downloading from the net and processing a image all at the same time. Which 32 meg Radeon are you looking at? LE, VE, SDR AGP Radeon, SDR pci Radeon or DDR 32 meg Radeon? Confusing yes, ATI maybe should be more discriptive in there models.

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nimrod   05-03-2001 at 05:35:52 AM
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Thanks for your reply. I am planning to get the ATI Radeon 32 MB DDR card. I suppose the question could be put another way: How do you determine if your graphics card is too strong for your CPU without buying the card and running some benchmarks.

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noko   05-03-2001 at 05:41:19 AM
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Tom's hardware did a scaling analysis of GF2 Video cards and for the most part at the higher resolutions a 600mhz processor was able to keep up virtually as fast as a 1.2ghz processor due to graphic card limitations. A Xenon processor with more L2 cache should behave more like a 550mhz processor so I think you will see rather good performance overall. The T&L in the Radeon will help out with lower speed processors.

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by noko on 05/02/01 11:42 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

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tartarhus   05-03-2001 at 08:11:29 AM
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I wouldn't waste my money on a retail radeon, get the LE and save youself $60.

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noko   05-03-2001 at 04:15:35 PM
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Just be warned that not all Radeon LE clock up to 166mhz (most do) some will clock up to 200mhz when proper cooling is added. Plus not all Radeon LE can have there HyperZ turned on (rare), some are actually broke. The Radeon LE T&L engine and video engine should always work. For the money this is the best buy for performance to cost.

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