.....but I'm really hooked on Need for Speed 2 and GTA SA. I've been playing on an old P3 with a cheap Nvidia card but I'm getting tired with the general sluggishness of it so I'm now going to swap this machine with my server box (Athlon XP 3200, Asus NF7-S Mobo, 512MB Corsair Dual Channel DDR400) and use that for gaming. The only thing is the graphics card in the server is an ancient ATI Rage128 so it obviously needs chucking. The Mobo supports AGP 8x so I should still be able to get something reasonably competent, I'm not willing to spend oodles of cash on one, but more than £30 (what I paid for the nvidia). I haven't a clue about price/performance so should I go for an ATI or an Nvidia card?

The machine will have to run linux as well as XP so linux drivers are a must, does this really mean Nvidia is the only real choice, the only other requirement would be a DVI connector for my next purchase. If I'm going to play games as well as other more boring activities would it make sense to have two XP partitions? One for games and one for everything else. Also, the box has a Tagan 500W quiet power supply, if the new graphics card has a power connector can I just connect a normal molex to it or should I up the PSU to one with a VGA-specific plug on it?

I never used to be interested in games but some of the stuff coming out now is unbelievable.

I was totally hooked on Need for Speed Underground and Colin McRae Rally 2 when they came out - such great games.

Get something that does DirectX Shader Model 3.0. The GeForce 6600GT is still a very good choice and recommended by many. You're looking at 100 quid though. It is a lot from a money point of view, but in my opinion you're missing out if you downgrade, and if you upgrade the price/performance ratio is too steep. IMHO it is the sweet spot at the moment.

As for Linux compatibility, the nVidia card would require the closed nvidia module, which works ok. ATi cards work well - my Radeon 9800 Pro does direct rendering out of the box in Ubuntu.

Pretty much everything should have DVI - if there is no DVI, something is very wrong. 500W should be fine for your rig. I'm running a ~400W Sparkle power supply on my overclocked-to-XP3200+ machine with bells and whistles. The graphics card would just have a molex on it, so there are no other new standards or plugs for it.

Umm, how about buying an X-Box 360 when they come out?

Gotta be much easier than swapping out machines etc...

Cheers

Cris.

The latest ATI chipsets only do DRI (direct rendering interface) when used with the horrid ATI binary-only drivers. Avoid ATI like the plague, until they get serious about Linux.

NVidia also is infamous for binary-only support, but at least their drivers work.

In the longer run, the open source ATI drivers are ahead of the Nvidia ones, though..

Cheers

Another card to look into is the plain GF 6800. I'm not sure about price compared to the 6600 GT. Just giving you thoughts. The AGP version of the 6800 has the same number of pipelines as the 6800 GT and ULTRA, they are just disabled. There is a simple software patch that will enable the other four pipleines, giving you a 6800GT (minus some clock speed....overclocked is the same though). It's been a while since I read about this though so I'd do research in it before you buy, as I'm sure you will. I'm just giving you something to think about.

For those readers with a PCI-X version, sorry, this doesn't work for you.