Video card

[[AK]The Beast]

My "old faithful" Radeon 9500 is finally giving up the ghost after 3 1/2 years of loyal service--the system crashes after 10-15 minutes of gameplay. Two weeks ago, it was only during high end games (KOTOR II, WoW). Last week, it started during games that are not what you'd call taxing (WWIIOL, Madden 2005). So I went to Pricewatch last night and ordered myself a Chaintek Geforce 6600 AGP 8x for $135--that's all I'm willing to spend right now, since in a year or two, I'll be ready to upgrade my processor/mobo/RAM to a PCI Express. Hopefully it'll come in before the weekend.

[[AK]The Beast]

Epilogue: this vendor gets very high marks from me. I placed the order on Tuesday night at about 10 PM (once the frustration of crashing every 15 minutes overcame my ingrained stinginess), selected the free shipping option, and learned today that my card left the UPS depot for delivery to my office THIS MORNING. That's less than a 36 hour turnaround using the free shipping option. These guys are called FuturePowerPC.com, and they're based out of NY State, so YMMV if you don't live in the northeast.

[[AK]Clay]

I wonder if the Radion is just poorly supported in some games. I too got Frequent crashes in KOTOR I. I just installed KOTOR II, and can't even get it to play.

[[AK]JD]

Beast,

how you like this new card. My 9800 is starting to also act "funny" and has put me in the new card market. The 6600 or the x700 are in my price range.

[[AK]The Beast]

A solid card for the low price. (I wasn't willing to spend more, as I'll likely be upgrading to a new mobo with PCI Express in another 18-24 months). I haven't really seen a huge increase in framerates or anything, despite moving from 128 to 256 MB of RAM on the card, but it's certainly solid. I'll give you an update tomorrow on how BF2 runs for me tonight--from what I've been hearing, that's the current "gotcha" that tells whether or not you've got an inadequate card. I can tell you that other games that would allegedly choke out lesser graphics cards run fine on the 6600, and ran on the 9500 as well--I'm speaking primarily of Doom 3 and Half-Life 2.

[[AK]StitchJones]

Pretty much your top shelf AGP card. It was a bit $$$ but I was due for a upgrade.
BFG

[[AK]Nuts]

I'm looking at the 6600 as well (old ATI 9600 is showing it's age). Are you running BF2 with all settings maxed? How's she holding up?