[clug] Decent video cards

[Matthew Hawkins]

Brad Hards said:
[nothing but a non-compliant pgp mime attachment...again...]

If you don't like Cougar, stroll around the corner to techwarehouse
(www.techwarehouse.com.au) and talk to Rocco (if he's still there ;)
As far as video cards go, you won't get any decent amount of hardware
accelleration without binary-only drivers as the manufacturers want to
pretend to keep their so-called trade secrets.  Matrox got popular with
offering dual-head (and quad-head) support, so dual-head is standard now
on most Nvidia and ATI offerings.  If I were to buy a new video card right
now I'd get an ATI Radeon 9[7/8]00, they blow Nvidias out of the water. 
Nice to see ATI taking 3D seriously.  Matrox simply don't have the 3D
power.  It's good enough to get by, but nowhere near good enough for
serious modelling or gaming.  There's really no-one else in the market,
not price-competitive anyway (3Dlabs are far too expensive).
Personally I don't think its worth buying anything thats not current, it
simply won't last as long particularly when you're looking at Doom 3
making a Radeon 9700 Pro crawl.  That's scary.  But of course its your
budget and your requirements that'll drive what you get.  A smaller Radeon
like a 9300 is ridiculously cheap and some may argue "good enough".  I
wouldn't go for any Radeon smaller than that though (and remember a 9000
is pretty much a re-badged 8900...*shivers*)
I was looking at the local Itanic and Opteron offerings, you can get the
small ones at a decent price but I'm going to wait a bit, firstly because
I still haven't researched the AMD and Intel 64-bit tech enough to make a
really informed purchase and secondly because the prices will come down
eventually ;)  They've only just come onto the market here so its probably
best to wait till consumer demand forces a decent price.From what I've seen the AMD chips are better (surprise surprise) but its
too early for me to offer some verdict I'm willing to make a fool of
myself over ;)
I've been looking because I'm in the market for a new PC also and I've
been waiting for the 64-bit chips to come out, and I think it'll be
interesting to see what happens especially with the existing 64-bit
systems that are available from Apple and Sun.
-- 
Matt