On 12 May 98 at 14:41, Andrea & Bill Lee wrote:

> Greetings all;
>
>     I am in the midst of purchasing a new computer, and I haven't been
> able to decide on a 3d  AGP video card. Other than internet usage, a bit
> of desktop publishing, kids games and word processing, I want to be get
> the best "bang for the buck" while running QuakeII.
>     What would be a good midrange card for Quake etc? I was leaning
> towards an ATI expert@work, but have found a few bad reviews on the net
> concerning their Quake play and problems running at 100MHz. I am
> purchasing a PII 266, 64 meg ram, 6.4 gb Quantum for reference sake.


  AGP bypasses the PCI bus.  The result is that if you have an AGP
card installed, that is the default handle for all 2D graphics, and
so a "traditional" 3D add-on card will not be AGP.  [There is a
3D-only card that fits in the AGP slot, but as far as I can see, it
works by configuring the slot as a double-speed PCI slot, not really
AGP.
  So your choices are going to be:

1.  3D card with separate 2D card; you won't really get 3D AGP this
way.

2.  AGP combo card with 2D and 3D on board.  In this arena, the
Diamond Viper V330 delivers much better bang per buck than was
expected.

  So that's what I'd recommend.

David G