I’ve used both ATI and Nvidia chipsets for years, depending on who had the best deal at the time. The one thing that gives me pause about Nvidia is there’ve been a number of questions lately about the longevity of the manufacturing process they’re using right now. So given the choice (and assuming I were buying something new rather than used) I’d go ATI right now unless I just couldn’t get an ATI card to work.

In this case, the Nvidia Riva 128-based card from 1997 that was originally in the computer would be overkill if anything, assuming it’s compatible with the new board’s AGP slot. I can’t remember if I tried it over the weekend when I had the case open or not.

Video cards are so cheap these days that it might be worth buying one. Even something that a gamer would turn their nose up to should boost performance over built-in video. And you probably know you’re hitting a good price point if some l33t gamer dudez snub your choice 😉

I’ve become more & more fond of nVidia these days, esp. since getting H/W 3-D acceleration to work reliably under Linux is so much more difficult with ATI chipsets (at least the last time I checked about a year ago…)

Yeah, this chip sure doesn’t seem like a slouch. Of course, I’m the guy who used to put a hot hard drive and video card in a 400 MHz Celeron, tweak out the configuration, and then set it next to a P4 and ask people which one was faster.

I don’t know if the onboard video will be a drain on performance because of memory bandwidth, and I’m pretty sure I need to find a hard drive that won’t bog the system down, but I have no worries about the CPU itself.