A friend asked me if he should buy a digital or analog LCD monitor. I asked him what type of video card he had and he said NVIDIA Riva TNT2 model 64. If I recall, that was a pretty good card about 3 or 3 1/2 years ago. Does anyone know if that card has digital capabilities?

chances are VERY slim that his card has a dvi connector, so he would have to hook up the lcd to the analog. kinda defeats the purpose somewhat of shelling out the extra cash.

but if he has that much to plonk down on an lcd, getting a radeon 9000 for $60-100 shouldnt be to hard on his wallet.

If he buys a decent TFT screen, chances are extremly slim that there aren't both digital and analog connectors available. Some really cheap screens only have the analog ones, but the better ons, from more common brands surely do.

There are three standards of Video Adapters :

" Analog" VGA : The standard 15 pin thing

DVI : Digital Video .. BUT there is :

Fake - DVI : This uses the + inside the connector for the videochannel , this is FAKE and is the same as Analog VGA.

True - DVI : This does NOT use the + (professional DVI card even have special cables to make sure you don't put Fake DVI connectors in it ; You can't connect a Fake DVI LCD monitor on it as well).

Almost ALL consumer LCD screens are either Analog VGA , Fake DVI or both. They are almost NEVER True-DVI.

Now if you want Ultimate Quality i suggest using a True DVI vga card (cad designers and medical applicants use these cards) and some 21" LCD screen with True DVI internals. This will cost you a little fortune.

The image quality of Fake DVI and Analog dvi does not matter. What does matter is that you use a LCD screen with a lot of resolutions (probably 1280x1024) and have a good refresh on the pixels (less than 1/24th of a second to eliminate shadow effects). Don't think about refresh rates of the entire screen. All LCD's are 60Hz .. there is no point in upgrading that , because you won't notice it.