NVidia vs ATI

I was going to go into one of my signature rants but I've decided to keep it simple. Most of my readership doesn't care about computer stuff anyway...

Slick and I are running nearly identical Dell Inspiron 530 computers. The key difference in the model of video cards. She's got the NVidia 8600 GT & I've got the ATI Radeon HD 2400. Both are 256 Meg cards. Both support dual DVI inputs. I'm here to tell you that hers works better.

The NVidia card allows for a dual monitor (digital & analog) setup at their maximum resolution & refresh right out of the box. It ran perfectly out of the box, even on a Vista machine.I could even run World of Warcraft (windowed) on one monitor while streaming video on the other.

The ATI card has required me to do 2 complicated reinstall of the drivers to fix mouse pointer problems and refresh issues. At maximum resolution of 1680x1050 on my Samsung 20" Wide SyncMaster 205BW, video will blink off and on occasionally. This was especially painful in the middle of playing a video game. When a second monitor is added in this config, the on-card cooling fan immediately becomes over-taxed. Even though the monitor and card are rated for 1680x1050 (note that the monitor works fine on her NVidia card) the only viable fix is to lower the Samsung to 1280x768.

The Control Center for ATI crashed after one of the driver patches and I could not restore it. After hours of research on their tech forums (it's a known issue) I learned that the easiest solution was to uninstall their center and just use the driver and the regular video control panel.

It's not that the ATI is a bad card. Now that I've finally (hopefully) got everything working, I'm satisfied. I'm just more impressed with the NVidia card. Everything I've read suggests that it's the best "low-end" performance graphics card out there. (I wanted to link the article I saw comparing it's performance to more expensive cards but I can't find it now.)