12-22-2003, 02:09 PM
1) Yeah... avoid anything that has the initials MX at this point. I'm convinced the GF4MX series was only designed so that Nvidia would have a nice cheap chipset with the GF4 label to integrate on the motherboards they were starting to develop. The other Nvidia cards should be better. I haven't really been following the market recently enough to make a specific reccomendation, other than that the GF4MX were "obsolete" (in terms of Directx8 compliance) before they were designed.
2) If your motherboard has support for DDR, then that would be preferable to SDRAM (but cost may be an issue, especially if your current memory stick is SDRAM). Basically you can get data from DDR twice as fast, as long as your motherboard supports it. If your motherboard supports something else, you probably won't have much choice on what you can get. You want memory that is rated for a speed equal or higher to your bus speed (or double that, in the case of DDR). In any case, you want memory from a reliable company, even if it costs a little more.
3) Combining one and two, do not get a graphics card if it is only using regular SDRAM for it's video memory. This should be pretty rare by now, but you may see it occasionally on the cards at the bottom of each series. In this case, your graphics card will be limited by the bandwidth of its memory, and you will end up with performance only marginally better than your GF2.
2) If your motherboard has support for DDR, then that would be preferable to SDRAM (but cost may be an issue, especially if your current memory stick is SDRAM). Basically you can get data from DDR twice as fast, as long as your motherboard supports it. If your motherboard supports something else, you probably won't have much choice on what you can get. You want memory that is rated for a speed equal or higher to your bus speed (or double that, in the case of DDR). In any case, you want memory from a reliable company, even if it costs a little more.
3) Combining one and two, do not get a graphics card if it is only using regular SDRAM for it's video memory. This should be pretty rare by now, but you may see it occasionally on the cards at the bottom of each series. In this case, your graphics card will be limited by the bandwidth of its memory, and you will end up with performance only marginally better than your GF2.