Dev-Picayune

I don’t really enjoy upgrading hardware. I am burned out on it. But it recently came time to get a new video card to build an additional machine. I agonized over the decision. I wanted the most bang for my buck. My current card was an Nvidia GeForce 4 Ti 4200 card which until fairly recently had still been considered a pretty fast card. I wasn’t totally unhappy with it’s performance either, but I figured I would get something better while I was at it. For awhile, there was a gap where the only way to get real improvement would be to buy a $225+ card. I’ve never spent more than about $130 so that kind of money was out of the question. Finally, with the release of their new Nvidia 6200 AGP versions I figured I could have some okay improvements in speed and a jump up 2 generations in card. I settled on a SA6200 AGP Card from Chaintech because it was about the best price going ($125 shipped). It took many hours of trial and error but after nearly pulling my hair out and returning the card, I found that EVGA’s driver for their version of the same card worked fine (or as fine as a beta/alpha driver could). It’s just absolutely disheartening to have to download a different company’s driver to make a card work. What’s even more concerning is that the new beta driver available from Nvidia (which is newer than the driver that EVGA has) doesn’t work right either. Now that is frightening. I have sent an email off to Chaintech and it will be interesting to see if they ever respond. Otherwise, I may be stuck with this card, or be forced to try to return it. In retrospect, I should have gone over to the ATI side and settled for a more mature 9600XT based card. We’ll see.