Crunchmeister

Like you said, you're not a fanatic who needs 100+ frames per second to be content. Neither am I. If I can run my games in 1024 x 768 with reasonable high detail at about 40 FPS, then I'm more than satisfied. I got an Abit Siluro with TV out, and it's been great. The visual quality is superb. Besides, very few games will start using the advanced features on the GF4 anytime in the near future (8 - 12 months). By then, the GF5 (or whatever NVidia has on tap) will be out, and the GF 4 will be affordable. Glad someone else sees it my way. BTW - I overclock my card to 210 core / 187 memory and it runs great.

I guess it all depends on how much gaming you do and how much money you have to spend. I have an Athlon 750, and I recently bought a GeForce2MX-400 with 64 MB to replace my aging TNT2 Ultra, and it runs every game I play at 1024 x 768, 32-bit color, in highest detail with more than acceptable frame rates. I am very satisfied with it. I went with the MX because of budget constraints. I do a fair amount of gaming, playing mostly Ghost Recon / Desert Seige, Jedi Knight II, and Global Operations, and they all run fine. I wish I would have been able to afford a GF3, but I am happy with what I bought. However, I am also aware that it's a rather short-term solution, and I will probably upgrade to a GF3 or 4 in the near future, once I upgrade to an Athlon XP CPU. However the MX-400 will probably run on the Athlon XP for a while after I get it until I rake up enought cash for the new vis card. So it comes down to personal preference and budget. Yes, the GF2 will play all todays games, and even some of the new ones in the near future without much difficulty, but it won't support some of the more advanced DX 8.1 features. So if money is really tight, a 64 MB GF2 MX should hold you out for a while, or wait a little longer till you get enought money for a low-end GF3. If money isn't an object, then you should get at least a hight-end GF3, and perhaps a GF 4. Just stay away from the GeForce4 MX-440. It's more like a GeForce2.5 than anything else. Cheers!

I didn't try this on my Windows XP box at home, but I did install it on my 1.7 GHz PIV running Windows 2000 at work. I ran some benchmarks with PCMark2002, 3dMark2001, and SYSmark2002, and the results are the same before and after. I'm not sure what this 'application accelerator' is supposed to do, but I haven't seen any improvement. Time to uninstall.

I haven't had any luck with any Detonator drivers with my 32 MB TNT2 (NON-WHQL or otherwise) in XP until I tried the 14.70. They seem to work really well. I don't get any more BSODs, and performance is good, although a little slower than the 12.x series in Win 2k. However, the hit is minimal. When you're in the 40+ FPS mark, a few frames less per second really don't matter all that much. The bottom line is that when it comes to stability, I'm willing to sacrifice a few frames per second.

I'm using Win 2k with an SBLive. While Liveware 2000 is kind of lacking in features, it seems to work for me. I have had a few issues, such as the suddden inability to load SoundFonts. I also seem to have problems with the Live's game controller, but I don't really use my joystick that often, and when I do, it's usually in Windows 98 because those games won't run in Win 2k. And my computer is fairly modest: Celeron 466 A-Bit BH6 v1.0 MB 192 MB RAM Diamond Viper V770 TNT2, 32MB A-Trend Helios 3D II, Voodoo II, 12 MB SBLive! Value Otherwise, the current drivers seem to be stable. My sound works flawlessly. All my games run fine. Only the lack of AEX support is rather annoying. ****! Creative must have been working on this since way before Win 2k was released. I would expect that they'd have this worked out by now and have Liveware 3 (or LW 4) realeased by now.