Good graphics card

[autobrakemedium]

I have just upgraded my PC, put a new motherboard in (Gigabyte GA7 ZX), AMD 1gig processor, 320 mb RAM, but I want to get a new graphics card. Do you have any recommendations. I also have the following query:

Before upgrading I had an ATI Exprt 98 card and a Diamond Moster II 3Dfx card. I have a DVD player.

My new systam has the ATI card in it but it keeps crahing if I put the Diamond card in it.

If I get a new card will it automatically deal with the DVD OK or will I still need an accelerator card?

Thanks in advance for your help.

ABM

[spannersatcx]

With that sort of power you wouldn't need a seperate DVD/mpeg decoder card, go for the new nvidia geforce chipped based cards, I believe the latest is the GTS. 64mb memory and loads of processing power.

[OneWorld22]

There's only really two graphics cards worth considering at the moment, now Nvidia have bought 3DFX.
The ATI Radeon 64mb,
or as pointed out any card that has the Geforce2 chipset. There's three cards that have this, the GTS, PRO and ULTRA. Each one has the same chipset but are clocked at higher speeds with the ULTRA having obscene amounts of power! But it is very expensive, the ULTRA could set you back +£300.

A few companies are producing boards with this chip,
Creative Labs,
Elsa,
Guillemot,
And I'm sure there may be more.

You really need one of these cards as any other card, expect maybe the Voodoo 5500, will cause bottlenecks in your system and thats the last thing you want having forked out for 1ghz of processing power!

p.s The ATI Radeon is a superb card and you can get it for under £200 in the UK. Computer experts say that it is one card that won't be rendered obsolete in a few months the way maybe the Geforce cards might be. (Nvidia produce new chips every 6 months).
The Radeon has enough features to keep anyone happy for ages.

[Squiddley]

I use a 32MB Winfast GeForce2MX board, which was about the cheapest and cheerfullest one around at the time. It doesa fine job, despite only coming with Chinese instructions. It was bundled with a great software DVD player, which works very well without any hardware decoding.

In the end, it depends on your budget and requirement. I'm pleased with it for general PCing, photo processing and gaming.

Hope this helps.
Sq