Recently I spent five bucks in a raffle and won, among other things, a copy of the spiffy new game Prince of Persia. Woohoo! I thought – until I saw in very small print that the game requires a Geforce 3 or better video card (Geforce 4 MX not supported).
I already knew the GeForce 4 MX is a crappy scam of a card, just a retooled GeForce 2, but it had never been an issue before. Now I’m in the market for a new video card, and I’m looking for advice.
Here are my parameters:
- I’d like not to be buying a new one again any time soon.
- I’m not a huge gamer, but play sometimes, and so my main need is a card that will just play the game; I don’t need to have that 60 FPS on the highest resolution nonsense.
- I’m a cheapskate, and won’t spend more than a hundred bucks on a card.
- I’m willing to go secondhand if that’s advisable.
So far I’m looking at the GeForce 5600XT GPU offered on this site. It’s $89.00, the cheapest I’m seeing anywhere (Pricewatch linked to the site), and the 5600s are getting decent reviews – the main problem I saw in reviews was that when the card came out, there weren’t games using its features. However, the review that had the most information referred not only to two different 5600 chips, they also were reviewing the 5600 Ultra, which is not what this is, I think. I have no idea what XT or GPU means.
Finally, I’m using an HP Pavilion 725n with a built-in GeForce 4 MX card (I know, I know); although there’s an AGP slot, I’m a little skeevy about installing another video card, given problems I had in the past under similar circumstances. Is this something I actually need to worry about, or were my problems with an e-machine due to e-machine’s unbelievable suckiness?
Thanks for any advice!
Daniel