Follow-up on video cards comparison chart:

Thanks to John, Robert and Bob - both of these links lead to exactly the kind of comparative chart I was seeking.  These charts provide an at-a-glance comparison between the better makes of video cards.

http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/20021218/index.html

http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/20030120/index.html


Follow-up on overclocking video cards:

Recently I asked about overclocking, with particular reference to video cards.  Since then, I've managed to modestly overclock my ATI Radeon 9500 Pro, which was surprisingly easy, once I found the right advice.  There's some good stuff here:
http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?s=&threadid=33654157

I didn't make great gains in performance, as I only did a software tweak, but I made some improvements to the card's speed, and learnt something in the process. 

For the benefit of those who are interested, and who are as clueless as I was last week, modern high-powered video cards have an onboard BIOS, just like a motherboard, which tells the card how to do it's job.  Like a motherboard BIOS, the video BIOS is also accessed from DOS, another eye-opener for me, as I'm running XP Pro at the moment and didn't know that it was possible to still get into the computer 'through the back door'.

The process consisted of making a boot disk (a special XP version), loading it with the flash program and a new BIOS, rebooting to DOS then running the flash command from the A: prompt, which wrote the new BIOS to the card.  Video cards don't have a GUI (Graphic User Interface) like a motherboard BIOS, hence the fairly primitive flashing method. 

In the case of my card, the new BIOS basically told the card to perform in a different way.  So now the card works a little better.

However, as a computer builder, I still think that it's best to upgrade to faster and more powerful hardware, rather than 'tweak' and possibly overstress your existing equipment.  And naturally, overclocking just about anything, will probably void your warranty.


Ian Porter
Computer Guys Inc.
Arrowtown
New Zealand
[log in to unmask]

                  Visit our website regularly for FAQs,
               articles, how-to's, tech tips and much more
                          http://freepctech.com