@ Mouse, please stop trying to irritate Raven for no good reason
, as for your opinion on video cards, I beg to differ, Nvidia drivers are
still known to be more stable than ATI (at least in any overclocker and games enthusiast sites I ever browsed), and they don`t conflict with diddly, unlike when I removed an ATI card and the CDRW suddenly STOPPED crashing after every write operation, I had spent ages trying to get it to work correctly and it was the video card all along, in my admitedly limited experience with two ATI cards, one was faulty and crashed every time you showed it a shader, several times it caused a critical error (driver unloaded while still in use) or just locked the whole machine, the other (older card) conflicted invisibly with a Philips CDRW, on the other hand I have NEVER had a Nvidia card crash (apart from out an of date AGP port BIOS driver I forgot to replace off the MOBO install cd that would have crashed any card), and in my experience they are quite and reliable, I have never suffered any device conflicts with Nvidia cards, and as for noise, you must be thinking of the early fx5900 cards, they where reportedly noisy, they later revised the cooling and they now run as quite as any other card in the same league (IMO), btw, you will find the latest driver releases (and an archive of older drivers) on the Nvidia site, likewise they hide the ATI drivers on the ATI site, cunning how they hide those drivers isn`t it?
, this is not a Nvidia fanboy rant BTW, I am just stating what happened to
Me, this is just my opinion and experience, and being a gadget freak I guess I spend a bit more than most people on this forum and have installed and used more gear as well, ATI cards may well be excellent, but
in my experience, Nvidia where just as capable or better and less trouble, this is just my opinion for people to read and assess, I don`t think I have some right to say this IS or IS NOT the case, just that I have used a fair bit of gear and this is what works for me, plus at the moment people on a low budget will get more bang for the buck from an Nvidia FX5200 (again, in my opinion, and yours too judging by the last line of your post)
Mentor.
PC1: P4 hyperthreading 3ghz, 1gig mem, 2x160gig hd`s, Nvidia FX5900 gfx, 6 way surround sound, PC2: AMD 1.2ghz, 512mb ram, FX5200 ultra gfx, stereo 16 bit soundblaster.