Which is better?

[Talon87]

NVIDIA GeForce 6150 (onboard)[/*:m:76c96]
ATI Radeon VisionTek® X1550 PCI Express x16 (separately-purchased GPU)[/*:m:76c96]

I am having difficulty installing my ATI Radeon and am contemplating returning it to the store.*â€Â* I will do so if it is worse than or roughly equal to the NVIDIA chipset in terms of quality, while I will keep it and try to get it to work if it is much, much better than my onboard nVidia chipset.

* My computer does not recognize that it is plugged in even though I have told the BIOS's primary init display to be the PCI-E slot and not AGP or anything else. Because of this, there seems to be little point in installing the drivers that came with the package, since the CD explicitly says "Do not install these drivers until you are prompted to by Windows XP recognizing that it contains new hardware." And the Hardware manager shows no signs of this ATI card; just the onboard nVidia.

â€Â* If I can only get an in-store refund, I will have $135 to spend and nothing really to spend it on, so I could use suggestions. My current machine parts include:
- 1 TB of hard disk space across two 500 GB drives
- Athlon 64 x2 4200+ @ 2.2 GHz performance speed (I guess?)
- 2 GB of DDR2 memory spread across two 1 GB sticks
- the ATI graphics card (which I'd be returning)
- decent onboard audio
- Sony 18x DVD±RW drive
- onboard ethernet
- onboard S-Video and TV out and stuff, I think (at least one of them)
- Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP2 (not really a part, but there you go)
- ViewSonic 19" TFT monitor
- IBM keyboard
- Kensington mouse (if I can get it to work; it was spazzing out earlier, so I'm using a Dell one right now)

[Raptor Jesus]

On board video/sound tends to be decent at best. They will always slow down a processor though because they use the same RAM as the rest of the computer while Video Cards/Sound Cards have their own RAM on them, thus freeing the computer a bit of processing power.

This is what I was told when I was deciding on whether to buy a sound card or not.

[Kasumi Violet]

Really, Talon, it depends what you want to do with the computer... I'm guessing since you're going to be in med school the answer isn't "playing the latest games" and that saving money will be a bigger priority than being able to play the latest 3d games. If your computer is going to be a gaming computer- get the non-onboard one, if your computer is going to be your work computer- the onboard one will be fine.

- KV

[Talon87]

The onboard one is fine, but I've encountered a new and disturbing problem ...

I have the Asus M2NPV-VM motherboard, and it appears that many consumers SINCE LAST SUMMER have been having trouble getting this board to recognize their DVI appliances. Major turnoff, really pisses me off, and really makes me wonder why Fry's was still selling this a year later at full price.

[Raptor Jesus]

Because they want your money. Duh.