Whiz-Bang Graphics: Top AGP and PCI Boards

POP QUIZ: Which of the following is not a good reason to upgrade your graphics board? 1) You're not sure which is shaking--you or the image on that big new monitor. 2) The video clips you just downloaded look like something off a fifties TV screen. 3) Someone said you can't get great graphics without an Accelerated Graphics Port board. 4) Your 3D game scenes seem to be made of Legos.

If you chose number 3, congratulations! You may have saved yourself the expense of buying a whole new Pentium II system that supports AGP. Because unless you outright want a new PC, there's little reason right now to buy one just for better graphics. PCI video boards are as fast as their AGP counterparts, and the chips they use are nearly as advanced.

For this graphics board roundup, we tested ten PCI boards and ten AGP boards and ranked the five best in each category. Topping the list of PCI boards is Real3D's StarFighter PCI, with great 3D, lots of video RAM for better gaming, and a nice software bundle. It's based on the new Intel740 chip, which brings good overall performance and great-looking graphics to the desktop.

Why shop for an AGP card? After all, if you own a Pentium II, you probably already have one. But if your PII system has an early, slow AGP board, you might find an upgrade worthwhile. Alternatively, if you plan to buy a new Pentium II soon, you'll want to make sure that it has a good AGP board. Of the ten AGP boards we tested, the Diamond Stealth II G460 leads the pack. Like the top PCI board (and four other top AGP cards), the Stealth II uses the Intel740 chip.

Why upgrade your graphics card at all? Gamers clamor the loudest for graphics power, but that muscle is also useful for more productive tasks--like photo editing and desktop publishing, which often demand higher screen resolutions. And whether you work with AGP or PCI, newer video technologies such as DVD demand additional graphics power. The DVD capability in ATI's Xpert 98 means you won't need a separate decoder card to play DVD movies.

Finally, you may want a little extra graphics oomph to handle upcoming (but slow-to-arrive) 3D business applications. The few such pioneer applications we've seen so far include Viewpoint Data Labs' LiveArt98, which enables users to add 3D plug-ins to OLE-compliant apps, and Portola's Fremont, a data visualization program. We incorporated LiveArt98 into our testing, but Fremont wasn't final at press time.

If gaming qualifies as a borderline obsession at your house, opt for a 3D-only card. In our gaming performance tests, 3D-only cards were almost 50 percent faster than their 2D/3D counterparts, and in general their image quality was much better. We tested five 3D-only cards (see "Gamer's Delight") and found that boards with the Voodoo2 chip performed best.