What PCI graphics cards do you all recommend?

Trip · Post by **Trip** » Tue Sep 30, 2003 10:45 am

Via ITXs and several PIII mobos lack AGP slots.

What PCI graphics cards do you all recommend?

Here is the selection and prices from the ati website:
(Having no ability to judge for myself I pasted them all)

ATI website PCIs w/prices

ALL-IN-WONDER VE (64MB PCI) $199

RADEON 7500 (64MB PCI) $129

RADEON 7000 32MB/64MB PCI $99/$109

TV WONDER VE (PCI) $76

TV WONDER PRO REMOTE CONTROL EDITION $149

TV WONDER PRO PCI 100 $99

I'm sure nvidia, matrox, and some others have good ones. www.mini-itx.com had two it recommended, but their site isn't working right now.

BaconTastesGood · Post by **BaconTastesGood** » Tue Sep 30, 2003 1:36 pm

You didn't say what you wanted to use the graphics card for? Frankly, ANYTHING attached to a PCI bus instead of AGP is going to be a liability for performance, so I see no reason not to stick with the integrated solutions available.

lacsap · Post by **lacsap** » Wed Oct 01, 2003 3:12 am

Matrox has the very good G450 PCI card

blakerwry · Post by **blakerwry** » Sat Oct 04, 2003 2:52 pm

The TV wonder cards are not graphics cards. They are conexant based capture cards. No output.

I was recently looking for different graphics cards myself and was looking into PCI designs. I thought the ATi 7500 (regular or all in wonder) looked very good. It is passively cooled and offers decent performance. The quality of the AIW card is equal to that of the other AIW cards because they all use the same vidio capture/output chip.

The downside is you could get an AGP ~9000 radeon for about the same price...

Your other option is to go with NVidia. I believe the geforce4MX is availale in PCI. It is based on a clocked up geforce2 chipset with multiple DACs making simultaneous TV and VGA out possible. If you are looking for perfomance then you should compare benchmarks between the 7500 and this card.

I believe both can be run passively.

[edit]
Oh, I have a g400 dual head (same speed as the g450, but a hotter chip) It is pretty slow... playing halflife, a TNT is probably just as fast.

blakerwry · Post by **blakerwry** » Sat Oct 04, 2003 9:26 pm

oh, aparently power color makes an ATi 9000 in PCI format... same with Hercules... don't know where to find these bad boys though...

[edit]
Aparently googlegear (know know as zip zoom fly) has them. http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDe ... ode=320676

They'll cost you a bit more than the AGP equivalent however.

Trip · Post by **Trip** » Sat Oct 11, 2003 2:57 pm

alright, so the selection narrows to three:

ATI 9000
Matrox G450
NVidia geforce4MX

mini-itx.com offers these:
Sigma Designs XCard and Remote
Gainward Geforce4 PowerPack Pro/450 w/ TV-Out 64MB MX-440SE DDR PCI
oh wait, that's the geforce4MX you were refering to...

Would a TV Wonder Card be useful, at all, with any of these? I included them b/c I thought they would be necessary compliments. That may be a stupid question, I'm gonna read up on these and see.

Thanks for your help, all further comments and recommendations are welcome. I'll be using a flat screen 15" 1501FP Philips/Dell monitor on win98SE if it helps.

I would have gone with a PIII mATX w/AGP (instead of the Via C3M266 i have now), but all those seemed so outdated... I was scared they wouldn't work with the Seasonic SS 400 I recently purchased. (purchased good equipment so I could easily upgrade when Pentium M mATXs and CPUs became cheaper) I already had a 933 Copermine and a Soundblaster Live! so the $60 mobo + $30 heatsink + ~$100 video card isn't too bad... If it'll allow me to use the internet, and maybe even watch a DVD or so, I'll be happy. Prob. want the best graphics possible to reduce any annoyance from graphics related problems, know what i mean?

BaconTastesGood · Post by **BaconTastesGood** » Sat Oct 11, 2003 3:36 pm

I think you can't really go wrong with any of those three for just general purpose work. I'd avoid the Matrox for any games though, even older ones.

Semm · Post by **Semm** » Sun Oct 12, 2003 1:12 am

And on the other hand, if you're not gaming, the common perspective is that the Matrox cards have the best image quality, particularly with DVI. Last Matrox card I had was analog, though (MGA Millennium)...

Semm

lacsap · Post by **lacsap** » Sun Oct 12, 2003 4:17 am

The SigmaDesign Xcard is not a graphics card. It's an hardware based decoder card (offloads the CPU) to playback MPEG, MPEG2 and DIVx files.

It all depends on what you want to do. Like Semm said, if you want to do some sort of HTPC, the Matrox is hands down the winner. Or if your CPU is not powerfull enough for video playbacks (you'd have to test it first), just buy the cheaper one and add an Xcard.

(review here http://www.mini-itx.com/reviews/xcard/)

Lacsap