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Now lets talk video cards. You want to choose the best one for yourself when running a
VIA chipset, or any computer. GeForce cards are pure speed demons. You’ll get great frame rates, but they
can be unstable on VIA chipsets. With voodoo 5 you get great stability, and great picture at the cost of performance. Remember,
Voodoo 5 may have 64 megs of ram total, but since it’s running two chips you really have 32 megs for each chip, which means it’ll act like a 32 meg card at high resolutions. That’s not it, don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten the new ATI Radeon. This card comes in a variety of flavors.
With the Radeon you get balanced picture, performance, and stability. It’s a multi-task card, great for the office, graphics, and things like video editing, but with a hefty price tag for the nicer versions. For a person who wants things running fast, get the v5 5500, its on the price drop since 3dfx’s buyout, its stable, and a all around nice card. Get a
GeForce 256, MX, GTS, or Ultra for the framerate fanatics.
Now we have to cover what you all dreaded. "Stupid $%@#& *^@#$%
GeForce, you may look good, but your performing like Billie trying to give a demo." Don't get that hasty quite yet, they're may be some help for you. First off, like I said before, have the latest drivers for the video card,
4-in-1 etc. If you're upgrading it may not hurt to delete your old drivers manually. For example your old
GeForce drivers will have nv***.dll, or nv***.vxd, just search your C:\ drive for files that look like that after you've done your uninstall and delete them. If you just upgraded you prolly want to reinstall your games as they may think there still running on your old card. If you have DX8, instead of trying to delete it and install DX7 do the following. First get the v7.17 reference drivers or later version of leaked drivers. Install them, then download a zipped version of the v6.49 drivers, and install the opengl32.dll file from that one replacing the v7.17 OpenGL file, as the 7.17 version was corrupt and faulty. Another thing you can do is flash your video cards bios. Before you do so may I suggest downloading the
GeForce tweak utility hosted at this site, try messing with the settings like agp 2x/4x,
Sidebanding, etc. You can also try to disable/enable video shadow, memory holes, and
AGP aperture size in your computers BIOS.
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