I'm looking to buy a new video card
 

Right now i have a gainward nvidia geforce4 ti 4600. This runs ok for the most part but i have very slow render times. It takes me about 15 hours or so to render 35 seconds of a fairly simple animation. I have windows xp home and a pentium 2.53ghz processor. Maybe these times are normal for a system like this...i dunno. But to my real question.

I want to buy an affordable($200 or so) card to run Maya 4.5. I use my computer for more than just maya but not really for games anymore. Am i better off going with an entry level workstation card or a card meant more for gaming and such? What are good places to look at for purchasing these cards? any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks:)

I would sugest you look at the recomended Card list Alias has and go with what price you can afford.
The other thing is that old/new drivers can make a big differance. I use a gforc4 440 using old drivers and it works great, new drivers dont work ( running 4.5 as well) would ditch winxp and use 2k pro, xp sucks up allot of resources from what i have experimented with several machines.
my opinion :)

I would reconmend the XFX 5900 XT (128 mb nvidia geforce FX 5900 XT)

only £143 and outperforms the asus radeoan 9600 123 mb the gigabyte radeon the gainward the creative blster fx5900 and is cheaper to

My card: GeForce 251

Upgrade: ANY GOD DAM CARD ON THE PLANET!

Cant you see i'm frustrated.

Dont get any gforce family card,,,drivers have incompatability issues, and sure u can downgrade it and it will work but u will downgrade some important features aswell,,,,,,,,using WIN XP professional ver is flawless same as nt and 2k ver,,,,XP home will work as well, just have the right drivers............Visit Alias for ur card compatability issues....Nvidia came out with new driver for gforce, u might want to check that out and it surely works with maya.......for the vedio card, I would suggest getting one of those quadro cards or wildcards, they work flawless.......Theres an older version of Quadro at frys for workstations and it works good,,,,,its less than 200,,,,,u might want to check that out...

No matter what video card you get it will not affect your rendering times at all... (unless you're hardware rendering...)