Originally posted by: Peter
I'd go with ATI, since low-end NVidia solutions based on their older chips tended to have an unfortunate track record of poor analog VGA signal quality.
Radeon 7000 are still being made, for exactly this purpose. For PCIE, it'd have to be an X300SE.
I agree, having and built PC's with multiple GF2, 3, 4 series cards and the whole gamut of ATI cards, that ATI cards are much safer for getting very good 2d quality (basically, they all look great).
The Geforce 2 GTS was infamously bad for text/2d, the GF3 wasn't really any better. The GeForce 4 was a big improvement and many cards were quite sharp with text.
A GF4 Ti 64MB from FS/FT would be an excellent choice, since you can get them so cheap. Other great choice if you can find them is a dual display ATI Radeon 8500/9000/9100. If you check my signature, you will see that I've put 8500's in all of my family's PC's because the text on those cards is basically as good as it gets. That's kind of my little secret for people who don't play games .