Video card suggestions please. Have P4P800E-Deluxe, P4 3.0E 800M, 1Gb RAM,
Antec NeoPower 480, Antec P180 case, 2 300Gb IDE drives. Not into gaming
at all. Heavily into digital photography. Most photos are running about
25MB in size. Currently have Asus N6600 TD 128MB which smears out video
and then locks up computer. Borrowed son's $30 AGP video card and smearing
and lock ups went away. Put Asus N6600 back in and back to smearing and
lock ups. Cheaper for me to buy another video card than waste any more
time with Asus N6600. Did the newest drivers, did the newest MB bios, etc
etc. Looking for any AGP video card suggestions that are stable with
P4P800E-Deluxe.
2D Quality
http://www.2cpu.com/articles/45_17.html
Matrox generally gets a nod:
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/6/ubb.x?a=tpc&s=50009562&f=67909965&m=5360973735
Where Matrox is weak, is sometimes their drivers/video BIOS leave
a bit to be desired. Before buying a product, check their download
page, to see if there are drivers for WinXP, for the card you
intend to purchase.
Unfortunately, all the discussions of "video card text quality"
I can find, are years old. The topic doesn't seem to be a
current interest with review sites.
As for compatibility, start here. Note that, for Matrox G400,
there are two generations of cards made, and one of them would
not work with your board. On the Parhelia, probably either
model would work for you, but one of the models causes problems
for people with really old 3.3V only motherboards.
http://www.playtool.com/pages/agpcompat/agp.html
Your motherboard is "Universal 1.5V AGP 3.0 Motherboard",
which means no 3.3V-only AGP cards. You can also use
PCI cards, with a consequent drop in redisplay speed.
The Matrox store shows what products are currently shipping:
http://shopmatrox.com/usa/products/categories.asp?CategoryID=74&Column=2
and companies like this would allow you to test out a Matrox
product for not a lot of $$$. Before buying one of these, I
would recommend getting more info on exactly what outputs
the card has etc., and as mentioned above, check for driver
updates on the download site, before buying.
http://www.compuvest.com/Description.jsp?iid=65780&cid=304&sid=0
Check for downloads here. Notice how poor G200 is at the bottom
of the page, for example. Probably anything still shipping
at retail, should have a driver.
http://www.matrox.com/mga/support/drivers/latest/home.cfm
If only some review site would compare output quality on more
modern cards, then maybe there would be more ATI or Nvidia
alternatives.
As for your original problem, I read on one site, where they
mentioned dragging text in Photoshop, caused afterimages of
the text as it was dragged. You might try an older driver
version with your card, to cure it. One technique you might
try, is take a virgin disk, install Windows on it, install
Intel INF (chipset drivers), DirectX 9 (from Microsoft), and
then a driver from Nvidia. Older versions of Nvidia drivers
can be found by drilling down according to your OS from
a link here - try drivers with release numbers greater
than the driver version on the product CD that came with
the card - WHQL certified drivers might be good ones to
choose:
http://www.nvidia.com/page/search.html?keywords=archive
Since your BIOS has no useful AGP settings, there is nothing
there to fiddle with.
Paul
