I had been wanting to try a different graphics card for awhile. My classic ATI Radeon is still quite the performer (and cost almost as much when I bought it two years ago) but in some motherboards ATI products can cause issues and so I was looking for another graphics card for my main system. The GeForce line of graphics chips are made by NVIDIA and while they may not be the "cat's meow" that they once were, they offer quite a lot of performance for the price.

At the store I had the choice of several cards:

1. A GeForce MX based card: which is basically a GeForce chip that has been hobbled by slow memory and some other external hardware issues. Priced around 100.00

2. A GeForce 2 TI 200 based card: which is the older GeForce technology that's been available for quite sometime in several incarnations. Priced around 150.00

3. A GeForce 3 TI 200 based card: which is the latest chip techology but it may be supplied with slower memory or clocked to a slower speed. Priced around 200.00

4. A GeForce 3 TI 500 based card: the best of the best, latest chip, fastest memory, highest clock speeds. Priced around $350.00

Based on many reviews that I'd read, the GeForce 3 TI 200 was the best value for the money. The GeForce2 and 3 cards have a tv output port on the back of the card. The GeForce2 cards come with a RCA F plug to S-Video adapter that the 3 card doesn't come with (I suppose they think that if you've got $200.00 for a video card you must certainly have a brand new television with a S-video plug in your home).

I first purchased the GeForce 2 TI 200 and put it in my system, I didn't think it performed nearly as well as my old classic Radeon video card and so I took it back to the store and exchanged it for the GeForce 3 TI 200. GeForce chips are primarily good at rendering 3D images for games. While they handle 2D graphics also, they don't do it nearly as well as they are designed primarily for heavy graphics.

Installation was straightforward:

1-in windows install the generic graphics driver and uninstall all utilities that came with your old graphics card.

2-Open the case, unscrew the old card and insert the new in the same "slot." AGP slots look different from pci slots (i.e. they are a different color than the rest of the slots)and are generally the first slot next to the power supply of your system. Make sure the card is fully seated and screwed in.

3-Either close the case or leave it open for testing so you can be sure it's going to work.

4-Turn on the system, if all is well you'll get a reassuring beep within a few seconds and you should get video on the screen. If you get continuous beep patterns something is wrong. Turn off the power and press on the card to be sure it's fully seated. If this is your first AGP graphics card in your system you may need to enter your system bios and make several adjustments. AGP Pallette snoop should definetly be disabled, on system systems AGP Fastwrites causes problems, if you've got video memory cache settings in your bios these may also need to be disabled.

5-Hopefully your operating system boots up. As usual, Windows is most supported with drivers for this product. I'm using Windows XP and drivers are available on visiontek's site as well as reference drivers on nvidia's site.

6-Install the drivers according to procedure for your operating system.

7-Reboot windows and run a graphics test bed such as "Final Reality" to be sure your card is installed properly.

8-Occasionally, windows DirectX will need to be reinstalled because of a graphics card change. If you have problems, try reloading DirectX before driving yourself nuts doing other things.

Notes on texture memory: In the bios of your motherboard you will find a setting that allows you to set the amount of system memory available to your AGP graphics card. If your system has 512k physical ram or more you should make this setting 256, if you have less then set it lower. As a general rule it should be set to half of physical ram. Most modern systems come stock with at least 256K of ram and so the setting in bios should be 128.

What does it come with?: Unlike more expensive versions of this card it doesn't come with a lot of free games, demos etc. The box contains a copy of PowerDVD software player (if you have DVD player in your system), the card, and a fairly well illustrated user and installation guide.

Problems I've encountered with it: While my motherboard purports to support AGP4X I've had no luck using 4X agp mode on my Gigabyte GA7DXR motherboard. I don't know if this is a motherboard bios problem, an operating system issue or just the fact that my favorite game gags when it's enabled. The difference between AGP 2X and 4X is supposedly pretty unnoticeable anyhow but as I've got a card that should support it, I'd like to use it. If I find the solution to this I'll post the answer.

UPDATE 3-21-02: I've been using this card for awhile, I've had some unexplainable reboots in windows xp home edition that I couldn't track down to anything obvious. After a recent microsoft patch to XP I started having more frequent problems.

After scanning the usenet groups I'm seeing lots of complaints from people with NVIDIA based video cards under XP. XP by default will reboot on a "stop error" which is generally any kind of serious error for which you may or may not get any explaination.

After I reset windows to not reboot on a stop error I started getting messages about the nvidia video card driver being stuck in an infinite loop. No matter what version of the driver I tried this kept occuring with the game diablo II lord of destruction, I personally don't think this is a game issue but a driver or operating system issue. Removing this card and reinstalling my old Radeon has stopped the problem.

It's interesting to me that microsoft has released a different driver for the nvidia cards, which, while available on the update site--I could never get to properly install while this video card was installed in the system. It sounds like either microsoft or Nvidia or both has some work to do before these cards will work properly under xp.

6-2002 update: I finally got tired of watching my card sitting in its box on the shelf and started doing some heavy duty research into making this thing work properly. The first thing I learned is that the combination of this card, windows XP, and any motherboard with all or part VIA chipset is susceptible to having the "infinite loop stop errors" that I described above.

There is apparently not one single solution to this problem and although VIA is doggedly working on the issue, it continues to plague a whole lot of people with any geforce card. On a newsgroup I was given this url: http://www.viaarena.com/?PageID=64 which is an article on via arena's web site titled "staying out of the loop." Fortunately in my case, the hint about disabling a part of the nvidia driver services was the solution in my system. The newer drivers now allow 4X agp mode to work properly on my Gigabyte GA7DXR and I'm also able to run with AGP fast writes enabled which is another bios setting that often causes performance issues or crashes on some system. There are also tweaker utilities that allow many undocumented settings on the card to be adjusted in further efforts to troubleshoot problems and even overclock the card for better performance. Now that I've actually got it running properly I'm pretty pleased with this card, of course now it's not the newest or the best anymore, sigh.

Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 199.00