tnt2 vanta or banshee

[David]

I was looking for a secondary video card and I noticed Guillemot has cards that uses both these chips. The banshee after rebate is $49 and the Tnt2 vanta is $69. I know the vanta is probably faster, but I have not seen any benchmarks. It only has 8 meg ram, while the banshee has 16 megs with glide. Which should I pick? Thanks

[rockinwy]

you stated that it was a tnt2 card i beleive you mean tnt1 anyway the tnt is a little faster but the banshee is supported by everygame made because it will run glide and direct3d, the tnt will only run direct 3d and from what I have seen even when it does work some games dont support it properly-eg.. final fantasy 7 for one.
I have the banshee and still like even though there are newer faster cards out. My brother has the tnt from creative labs and on amdk6-2 300 machines the banshee is faster you have to go over 400mhz before the tnt is really faster. right now I would look into the voodoo3 2000 I think it is supposed to go for $99 and will be faster than either.

[AuraEdge]

I woulda replied earlyer but i was at a loss to indentify what the 'vanta' isby proess of elimination vanta is either Riva 128 or Riva TNT. If its TNT, then on intel systems TNT is eay faster compared to banshee. Banshees faster on AMD's tho. If vanta's the 128 (which i think it is cuz u said it has 8MB of ram), it sucks and dont get it. Cuz ive heard Riva didnt shape up til TNT came out

[BBA]

Aura, I dont know. I dont recommend a Riva 128 any more, but in the old Voodoo 1 days, the Viper330 was a good contender. It wasn't until the V2 came out that Riva went back in the closet.

Oh, I have seen 8M TNT's, so it prob is a TNT not a 128, because most 128's were 4M.

BBA

[cobain1crt]

Banshee, all the way. Fast, overclockable, compatable, and if you have socket 7 (AMD/Cyrex), TNT cards sometimes do not work at all.

[David]

Thanks for the inputs. Maybe I am mistabken, but if you look at the Guillemot website, it tells you the Phoenix 2 uses the Nvida Vanta chip which has a TNT2 core. I also checked out the Nvida site and it also said a Vanta using the TNT2 core. But with 8 meg or ram, all the texture memory must come from the computer ram which would probably be slower.

I know the Vanta is a new chip, so it will be messed up for about 3 months before a good driver comes in, but after that, will it be faster?

[WhoKnowsWho]

What are you going to be doing and playing? That you are even considering these two sub par cards makes me think that you aren't going to be playing much, or if you do, you won't be expecting that much performance. What is your computer setup? CPU? etc.

An older computer, 266 and under, and especially if it is a socket 7, you would be better off with the Banshee sadly, but you would probably be happier with a V3200 for a bit more.

A newer computer, 350+, non socket 7, go for a regular Vanilla TNT2, a Vanta would be a bottleneck for the system.

But of course, this all depends on what you are going to play and such too.