savage4pro or tnt m64 (extremely limited budget)

savage4pro or tnt m64 (extremely limited budget)
will be used in a second pc and i wanted at least something that can run halflife/q3
what would be better to run at high res in windows?(2d)

Savage4 has better picture than M64, S3TC texture compression definitely helps there and lots of upcoming games and DX8 support that. M64 is a piece of crap - dont even bother.

I would recommend the 3dfx Voodoo3 2000 16Mb AGP over both these cards as 2D is blazing fast with this card and driver is fairly solid for Win98/Me/2000 ... you won't have any grief at all with this card and about the same price now. Have seen the odd weird compatibility problem with running the diamond stealth S540 Savage4.

Since S3 is now an internet appliance company and dropped their 3D chip line, forget about any Savage future driver support!! Not a good choice - Savage2000 sure does not work with ATI TV-Wonder for those of you wondering out there....

Voodoo rocks in this price range!!!

Agreed. For the money, grab a Voodoo3 2000.


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"Everyone knows the best bands are affiliated with Satan."

Quote:

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Originally posted by wacked:
M64 is a piece of crap - dont even bother.

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well i personally have a TNT2 M64 and it isn't a piece of crap @ all. It is stable, has very good image quality and can be quite fast @ lower resolutions. It's also an easy overclocker, i have mine running @ 140/140.

But like wacked said: it's better buying a v3 2k. It's cheap, it overclocks very good, it has glide ... the only drawback is that it doesn't support 32bit & large textures - but the TNT2 M64 is too slow (imo) to use 32bit anyway.

So, if you have very little money to spend: go for the v3 2k!



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hehe, Anaxander still rules!!

thanks for the feedback guys it is appreciated =)

I have a PIII 600, and I have owned both cards. The TNT2 M64 is way the hell better. The savage 4 is crappy, even with 32MB. It is about 30% slower

There's people on this board talking about getting GeForce2 MX's for $50-$75. If you're thinking about playing a good game of Quake3, spend the extra 10 dollars to get something that's running real good and for the money will be a card for the future.

Just read some of the other posts in here about the cards.

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Lance

Check out what I'm doing here, I could use everyones support.

Yes the M64 is crap.. at 1024 * 768 in Q3A with demo1 and all 32bit texture and full texture full sound it got like 10.5 frames per second whereas my Creative Labs TNT2 got 33.4 ..

Quote:

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Originally posted by Ewenjames:
I have a PIII 600, and I have owned both cards. The TNT2 M64 is way the hell better. The savage 4 is crappy, even with 32MB. It is about 30% slower

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Well..That backs up my theory. I'm currently testing the CPU dependance of NVidia cards, and I guess that adds a bit more to my research.

I own a K6-2/450, and have used both cards as well, and the only thing the M64 had over the S4 was the absence of permenant specular highlighting (although I'm not sure if this is still the case). Both ran about the same under hi-res (1024x768 w/V-Sync on), but the S4 pulled away by about 20% when the res was dropped (640x480). Image quality on the S4 was far superior to the M64 (does anyone else find that pattern dither annoying?), plus it has support for S3TC and MeTaL (Not that anything besides Unreal (Tournement) uses it, to my knowledge) in the hardware.

My advice, buy the S4, unless you have a higher end machine (P3 600+). The image quality is superior, and the speed is adequit (faster than the M64 on low end machines). If it's a second machine, than I doubt it's anything really fancy, so go the Savage. Who knows...Maybe Via will sort out what's left of the bugs.

METAL can be used in: Unreal, UT, Deus Ex, Wheel of Time, and everithing else that uses Unreal/UT engine. In 3D at 800x600x32 Savage4 will do just fine.

If you wanna save a lot of money, get the 3dfx velocity videocard. It's a voodoo 3 with 8mb. It performs the same and overclocks well. I think it's about $50, nowadays. Maybe even cheaper. If you can get a geforce 2mx for under $75, defenitely go for that! I had the savage4pro and it sucked! Drivers never worked, games never worked, eventually trashed it and got a Matrox g400. Be careful because some socket7 boards have trouble with tnt2 cards. 3dfx Voodoo cards are always the safe bet.

look around on the net
voodoo3 2000 can be had for around $75 definately a better buy

Savage2000 based cards not an option?