My wife was the one that told me i should ask these questions on here because you guys have a great knowledge on these issues. First one is on a graphics/video card.. At the moment i'm using the Radeon 9600 128MB DDR ram..nothing great i know. My wife wants to buy me another graphics card for christmas and needs to know which one i want, now i have a price limit i can go for so there is one problem... What would you guys suggest i get..i was looking at moving up to a better Radeon with 256MB DDR ram or maybe a good NVIDA card. Next hardware question is on a hard drive, i'm upgrading my harddrive from the mere 120GB to a 200-250GB one and would like to know what brands i should stay away from in your opinion...Maxtor is one i WONT touch, i have had nothing but trouble with the two Maxtor papers weights i have here...one being 120GB, other is 80GB.. Sorry for this being way off topic..just hope you can help my wife in buying me my christmas presents ;)

I run an Nvidia GeForce FX5600, which is not the best card out there, but it is really good. I'm not sure how it compares with your Radeon, as i'm an Nvidia man, myself. As far as your drive question, Western Digital is a very good way to go...some of the best hard drives on the market right now.

That's odd,..........I've never had any problems with Maxtor. On the other hand I've had 4 Western Digitals crap out. I mainly look to Seagate these days,........I have found them very reliable,........that's just my opinion.

A lot depends on why you are upgrading your card. Many times,a card that is designed for gaming,may not perform as well in 3D graphic environments.(Such as OpenGL) I have a 3DLabs Wildcat 880 Pro,which serves me well for Open GL. So it depends on what you want to do..Is your wife a gamer? or a 3D Artist? I've had all types of dives succeed and fail My Maxtor served me well for several years ,but did give up the ghost.and my Western Digital drives have also crapped out after a while. My Seagate does pretty well so far but I've had an IBM that clearly beats them all in performance. It could very well be the luck of the draw but I've found the Seagate drivers to be most efficient. Tom

I'd go with Nvidia 6600GT with 256 MB. I simply don't like ATIs and have no idea what card of theirs would be the equivalent. Some kind of X800 probably. Anyway, ordinary 6600 with 128 meg ram is about $130, while GT with 256 is around $190 but is simply better. Hard drive, I have two Maxtors in my computer (40 & 160 IDE) and a specifically ordered Maxtor SATA 160 at work. All work very fine. I don't think you can err with practically any brand - any of them can have a bad run. For instance, there was a whole series of IBM disks here that died almost as soon as they were installed.

I've had a few HDDs over the last 10 years, and the only ones left and still working in this house are western digital ones. I've been told that Seagate are also a very good brand. edit - my graphics card is very low end, so I won't try and give you any advice there lol

Message edited on: 12/10/2005 02:00

Oooh yeah...I would never recommened an ATI card.
It could be just me but I've had nothing but bad luck with ATI cards for some reason.

Tom

Message edited on: 12/10/2005 01:59

I have been very happy with my Nvidia FX5900-XT from MSI. I assume you have a mobo with AGP. One thing to watch is what level of AGP support your mobo has vs what the card wants for full performance. As to drives, buy two and always back the crucial (non- retreivable) data on both.

I don't have a graphics card - I have this tiny little guy with a pencil and loads of paper sitting inside my pc......

I'm using a Radeon 9550 128MB DDR ram as an AGP card, the graphics is inbuilt with my motherboard. 3 hard drives,80gb, 120gb and 250gb......all filling up quickly! LOL. Had Maxom, Seagate and Western Digital, reason for changing was space, they all worked fine. I did hear that for secure reasons its best to use the same manufacture hard drives but, it didnt do me any problems. As to having little people working inside your comp, if it works for TB, then I'm all for it!! LOL

I also have an NVidia 6600 and really like it. I've had about 4 NVidia cards and haven't had issues with any 3D apps (LW, Vue, Bryce, as well as compositing and editing software). I have used a couple of ATI cards and found that they each had issues with one app or another. Could have been poor model choices. As for drives, I also have had problems with Maxtor dives, although I "hear" that they are much better than they were. I've had great luck with Western Digital until just recently when I've had two failures within a couple of weeks within each other. It may not have been the drive's fault however; we have had issues with our power lately, (outages and probable spikes) and everything seems to be MUCH more solid since I bought a UPS. (That would make a great gift also). I'd also like to take this opportunity to say I want your wife. Mine gives me looks that could kill when I make any computer-related purchases, let alone encourging me to spend time researching components on the internet for Christmas gifts. If it's not for the yard or "home improvements" and I buy stuff for the computers I've learned to sleep with one eye open.

In the reasonable price range the best card you can get would in my opinion be an nvidia 6800GT card: http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=322987 Nvidia has very good openGL drivers and are more stable with 3D apps in particular. Unless you get an ATi FireGL card, the ATI cards are geared for games. Unfortunately, the best operating and best value drive you can get is with maxtor. There have been problems in the past with maxtor, but they have cleaned up their act. Just check the reviews on this drive and you'll see that it's a winner. It's also the second fastest drive you can get. Maxtor diamondmax 10 300GB drive ATA 150 (or serial ATA if you have an SATAT connector) and 16MB buffer: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1487962&CatId=525 for $140 On this speed comparison page (it's for macs but that doesn't matter), you can see the comparison between the top-end drives. The maxline III is the same as the drive I recommended above, and it outperforms all the other drives in every test but one. The seagate is the slowest of the drives tested: http://www.barefeats.com/hard48.html

id say go with ati best bang for its bucks lol

LOL@MarcFX.......

I'm currently running with three Seagate barracudas (one 20, two 40s) and a Samsung 200 gig (SATA). Haven't had any problems with the Seagates, the 20 gig has been in continuous use for over five years now. I recently managed to grab some data of an old 500 meg drive (after probably 10 years), but I can't remember what brand it was :)

i use the ati 128meger 9600xt and havent had any issues with any gaphics applications, the only marketable difference would be in gaming. if your looking to play games with a serious card, make sure your power supply can handle the extra output. and your motherboard can make full use of the upgraded card. just an fyi, hate to have ya all jazzed to play FEAR and something else blindsides ya. wish i could suggest a card, i wont be in the market for one for a little while anyways so i havent been up on whats out. i use a maxtor 80 gig for my applications and OS and a sumsung something something with 180gig for media. never any problems, had em for years. my previous drives turned into targets after they got yanked from the tower and drilled though by a nasty individual, but they were the exact same drives and they last a few years without any issues too.

I bought an Nvidia 6600GT back last January when the AGP version with 128mb came out. I paid about $125 US for it and I bought the XFX brand one since it was the only one at the time that supported dual DVI connections. I have been pretty happy with it and the only problem I have had I haven't investigated and I doubt it is a hardware problem you will experience now. A few thoughts: for Nvidia cards, the 6600 is the slower kin to the 6800. GT is the slightly faster version of the non GT version. The 6800 has been surpassed by the newer 7800s which are very expensive. 128mb is enough for most uses unless you are into gaming big time in which case, buy the 256mb version of the 6800. Obviously, if you have 700+ US you could buy the 512mb version of the 7800GTX or something. The 6600 and the 6800 come in AGP & SLI. AGP is the 'old' standard that the vast majority of computers have and support. If your motherboard is < 1 year old and was a pretty good machine it MIGHT support SLI. If not, AGP is probably what you have. The 6600/6800 are AGP 8x. Almost all newer cards are 8x. The 8x and 4x speeds I think are compatible, maybe...but I'd check on what you have. No sense in buying a better card if the mother board won't support it. Single monitor or dual? What kind? Most of the newer cards should support dual monitors. Decide if you want this feature. I find it to be very useful. I run dual 19" CRT monitors and when I bought the 6600 almost all models supported 1 CRT and 1 DVI. Many will come with an adapter (around $20) to convert a DVI to CRT in case you want dual CRTs (versus 1 CRT and 1 LCD flat panel which uses DVI). I KNEW I wasn't going to spend the $ for an LCD and I also wanted the 2 CRTs to be the same size. A 19" CRT is <$200. I love having both side by side, each running 1280x1024. By buying a video card that supported dual DVI (and came with 2 adapters) I could upgrade to dual LCDs if I wanted at a later date. Hard drives: everyone has their own preference on drives. My biggest suggestion since you are obviously weery of loosing data is to either backup to CD/DVD your important files, or buy an external drive or 2nd internal and have the 2 synced together so that if one dies the other one has all your data. You can always reinstall windows on a new drive, but having the backup data is good. Note: There is a new drive technology, SATA (serial ATA) that differs from IDE/EIDE drives that you already have. It is doubtful your motherboard will support a SATA drive. Likewise, if you spend big bucks on an IDE drive that is large and then buy/build a new computer in a year, it is likely that the new one won't easily support your 'old' IDE drive. Hence you may or may not want to invest in a big one or an internal. An external USB may be better. Or, find a used or small 80gb drive, internal, and manually backup your work folders every week or two onto it. It will be faster than a CD burner and easy to use. Check out some of the following 3 sites for good reviews and information on video cards. I prefer toms hardware, and they have some great benchmarking charts for video cards. www.tomshardware.com www.arstechnica.com (very geeky) www.extremetech.com

Well thanks guys for this. I wont be playing games because i find it hard playing them with the use of one hand plus i'm really not a gaming person. The motherboard i have now supports the AGP 8, radeon 9600 is an agp 8 graphics card :) With what you have all told me i will at least know what to look for and make sure i don't buy anything i can't use later. I'll look into the harddrive further as i hate backing up to CD, takes damn to long for my liking..

You can always buy a bit cheaper card and then add a DVD burner. They go for about $50 now. So, 6600/6600 GT it appears it is. BTW, it's not AGP and SLI, It's AGP and PCIe. SLI is Nvidia's system to use 2 cards with one monitor, achieving a great speed of display. There're no AGP SLI cards. AGP is a dead standard, but you use what you can use, because all the card manufacturers switched/ are switching to PCIe. But when you get tired of that card, you will have to replace motherboard, memory, processor and the card together anyway. (That's what I'd have to do, I've got AGP 4 in my computer. :-)) Don't sweat it.

I am scared to backup my data onto a DVD, I've had too many disc corruption problems to trust an "open surface" optical media like a dvd or CD with precious data unless you locked it in a safe immediately after burning it to keep it nice and shiny :) I've never had a hard drive problem that was serious, and for that I am thankful. I backup my important files to my ipod, so in that respesct maybe a properly sized-to-your needs portable hard drive could be a good backup solution, as they tend to be much more rugged than their 3.5" cousins.

a. NVIDIA G-Force FX 5600 with 256mb ram should be good (under $200) b. Western Digital has a great rep. get one at 7200 rpm.

Seagate does make a pretty reliable drive...my old 10 gig Barracuda that my P3 800mhz machine came with still works just fine, as does that old dinosaur of a machine. Slow as molasses, but she runs. Can't say that Dell never did anything right...she was real good for a few years.

Good catch on the PCIe (pci express) instead of SLI. I knew it sounded wring as I typed it...at 2-3 am! I'm not sure there is any real benefit buying a 512mb video card for a non gamer at this point. In order to get the memory up and price down you will find the GPU speed and features reduced. You may be better off with a slightly higher end 256mb card.

I have 5 Maxtor hard drives, all still working perfectly after 4 years. For backups, an external hard drive is way easier and faster than CD backups.