OK, I've been doing a couple of hours of light research on gfx cards, and have come up with 3 - The Geforce 7800GT, 7800GTX, and Radeon X1800XL. So far, the benchmarks ive found show the 7800GT to be the cheapest (around $389) and only slightly slower than the Radeon X1800XL (around $435), and the fastest, the 7800GTX ($449). I think the GTX is the best choice, since its (in the tests ive found so far) the fastest in its class, and the X1800XL only barely outperforms the 7800GT, and the 7800GTX blisters the X1800XL... I hope im getting this right... also, ive read a lot of talk about SLI and Crossfire? Does this mean I need 2 of these cards to use them? Or that I can use 2 if I want to? I am only looking to buy 1 card.. and so far the 7800GTX is a little bit more than  I wanted to spend, but as long as it futureproof's my system for the next year or two of upcoming games, its ok. Any opinions/suggestions? THanx~!

Howdy, I've been out of the computer business for about a year and a half, had gotten married, sold all my systems, etc... anyways, I am now finally in the market to buy another system! My last system ( a year and a half ago) was a P4 3.0GHz 800FSB Prescott, DFI LanParty 875P mobo, 512MB DC DDR400, Radeon 9800XT, and it was at the time, one of the baddest systems a mainstream user could get... well, after all this time now, I havent been keeping up with anything, I dont know whats leading the way now (Intel or AMD, Nvidia or ATI, etc). Ive been hearing a lot of good things about the new S939 A64's, with the integrated dual channel controller, and havent seen really anything different going on with intel (except the dual core deals, which seem to be out of my price range). I am willing to spend about $200-$225 on a CPU (I dont think any of the dual core pentiums can be bought that cheap) $100-$125 on a mainboard, $350 - $375 on a gfx card (a couple of people have told me I cant go wrong with a Geforce 6800GT??) and $100-$125 on memory. Total, I have appx. $1100 to spend on a new system.. What do you guys recommend? The system will be used for nothing other than gaming and light internet use (dial up is all thats available). I do a LAN game or two as well, but not often.. Also, when I was in this stuff, AGP8X was the best out, now I see theres PCI-E... is it worth getting? A lot better than AGP8X? If you recommend PCI-E, whats the best PCI-E gfx card in my price range? All my games are older, and the 2 that I have that tax a gfx card the most are Doom 3 and Half Life 2... which really kicked my old 9800XT's butt.... I need something to be able to run these games (and the newest first person shooters) at 1280X1024X32 with all details maxxed and keep a 50+FPS framerate. Any opinions, suggestions, or help is greatly appreciated!!!
Thanx in advance
-Damascus

I just bought another system, my problem is solved I can play every single one of my games now on 1024x768x32 with detail settings as high as they'll go.
Athlon Thunderbird @ 1.2Ghz
ECS K7VMA w/ 256MB PC133 SDR
Geforce 4 MX420
Soundblaster Audigy Gamer
Fujitsu 20GB UDMA100 HDD
Still not as fast as 98% of the computers owned by the rest of these people in this forum, but I'm extremely happy with it
To Rolo01: 3D Mark 2000, Voodoo3 PCI=1688 3DMarks vs. Geforce4=2122 3D Marks. I love my voodoo, but the geforce spanks it.
Heres a tip I got from Sy at the VoodooFiles Forums, if you play RTCW, this boosts performance A LOT, this almost made it run acceptably with the K6.. \COM_MAXFPS 50  ... game cant render anything higher than 50 FPS, resulting in smoother gameplay, and you're eyes cant see the difference between 50-100 FPS anyways.

The actual GPU chipset is not really what should be giving me a performance boost here, its the bus type. Its PCI (33mhz) vs. AGP (66mhz for 2x i think). And its got like triple the memory bandwidth. Im hoping the problem lies within windows using the virtual disk cache instead of all my physical memory. I'll play with that and see if it runs better...

Ok, this is worse than I thought. I just got through playing the game, and heres the problem: performance 1024x768 high quality 32bit setting is "ever so slightly" slower than the performance at 640x480 low quality 16bit. Also, overall performance with the GeForce4 MX420 64MB DDR AGP 2x is not much faster than the old Voodoo3 3000 PCI. I mean this is 166mhz vs. 250mhz GPU and SGRAM vs. DDR and AGP 2x vs. PCI. If I were guessing, I'd say the Geforce puts out maybe 5-10max FPS more, this thing should be BLOWING THE VOODOO AWAY! All I can figure is maybe somethings wrong with my memory, processor, or motherboard. 3D Mark 2000 reports my board supports AGP side band addressing but its disabled. This should boost performance enabled, right? I dont know how to enable it, theres nothing in my BIOS (or at least I think) about side band addressing. Anyone got any suggestions? Thanx everyone!

Thanx everyone. I'll try doing that tonight amp_man. Thanx for posting the screenshots. I'll post back tomorrow with my results. I HOPE i dont have another clusterf***, ive spent like 6 hours getting everything set back up on here the way I had it lol. Thanx again Amp and Glide!!
P.S.- What are bad sectors and how do I fix them? I had a little bit on the drive before the crash, and now on this new install, scandisk reports more. How can I fix these? Thanx!

Thanx for the replies. I might need you're help again though, I had to re-do everything on my hdd, so I'm installing RTCW again at the moment. I also installed a faster card, a Geforce4 mx420 64mb ddr agp (2x) so when its totally up ill try to play it again and see if this card can do it. I dont have a dual card system Glide, I've got 2 different systems, the Riva was in my 400mhz system. I couldnt play ghost recon with the V3 either, so i just broke down and bought an Nvidia (i know ATI is better) but I got it for $20 brand new, couldnt pass it up. I'll post on here again tonight or tomorrow with my new card results, because if the new card cant play it, somethings gotta be critically wrong with my system. Thanx again Glide and qrazy!

I just installed Return To Castle Wolfenstein and tried to play it and it runs very unacceptably. Its on the k6-2 500 in my profile. I have an SGRAM model Voodoo3 3000 PCI on Amigamerlin 2.9 drivers and Wicked GL 3.02. The thing is... I used to play this game, and it ran "ok", on a 1ghz athlon with the SAME exact vid. card, and played it on this computer once a few months ago and it ran "ok", then tried again last night and had this problem. The only thing thats different than last time is the addition of a faster hdd (PIOmode 4 to UDMA33) and the addition of memory (256mb to 384). All my detail settings are on lowest and GL extension is enabled. My Voodoo is also clocked at 169mhz instead of stock 166. I have DX 8.1 installed (game comes with 8.0). What could be causing this? I've tried re-installing my drivers and re-installing the game, with no luck. My PCI latency timer is set to "32", if its of any relevancy. Any help with this is greatly appreciated! Thanx everyone!


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Im going to install Windows98SE and WindowsXP (w/ NTFS) on the same HDD. I just ran Partition Magic 8, used the option to install another OS, chose WinXP, it rebooted to DOS and started its thing, and got a batch error... now I can't load any OS and I've got Maxblast running a zero fill low level format now on it... which looks like is going to take ALL night... I guess this time I'll try setting a primary and secondary partition with FDISK and install XP on the primary then try formatting the secondary with fat32 and install 98... I dont know how this is going to act when I try to boot.. I've never tried doing this before except with linux mandrake, which went, and still is going smoothly. Anyone got any tips on this? Would Maxblast3 be better to use than FDISK? Any suggestions and opinions are appreciated! Thanx everyone!