I want to get a new video card soon. Mine is a Voodoo 3 and it’s really showing it’s age.
I have an AGP slot, a 1.2 GHz AMD processor, 256 MB of SDRAM RAM.
What’s a good video card that won’t break the bank, is very compatible with most games and will provide sufficent processing power to play more recent games?
Since you’re looking for advice more than hard facts, I’ll move this thread to the IMHO forum.
bibliophage
moderator GQ
Thank you.
You may want to investigate another CPU, I think that no matter what card you look at, it will end up being limited by the one you have.
I guess you are running a Duron, you should be able to go quite a ways further with that motherboard but you haven’t given much to go on.
I think in therms of getting most for your money, you would be best to avoid buying any of the NVidia FX series cards, they are pretty much seen as a mark time card from the Ti series.
The FX series cards can render DX9, but other than that the Ti series, which mostly don’t run DX9(except the Ti4800 - which is just a Ti4200 with some few extras installed) the best of the Ti series is definately the Ti4600.
You can get these cards very reasonably on E-Bay.
By doing this you could probably save yourself enough cash to purchase a motherboard and chip, something like a AMD XP2500+ would be a good bet, again, you will get something very useful for moderate cost.
If you want to get something that can run DX9, which is what most of this generation games use, then the Radeon9600XT is a very good bet in terms of price/performance, especially if you can get hold of the Fireblade version which is fairly rare.
If you have a little more money then perhaps you might look at the current best price/performance card which is the GeForce 6600GT AGP.
This is running the very latest technology and was originally built for the shiny new PCI-E motherboards, however there is now and AGP version out.
It outperforms all the other AGP cards out there, including the marvellous but expensive Radeon9800XT, and it does this by quite some margin too.
This article is a little out of date, since it has been overtaken with the latest generation, but most of the points you need to consider before purchasing are highly relevant.
http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20041110/index.html
Still think you’ll need a more powerful CPU though, it really depends upon your cash, some of us think its not too wise to go out and purchase the very latest cutting edge stuff as the value drops rapidly, technology moves on too quick, and they are therefore somewhat of a waste of cash, since you can do just as well for half the cashh, if you are prepared to wait six months after the latest shiny thing comes out.
Well, since the NVidia vote has been cast, allow me to offer the ATI vote. So far, the most versatile card that I have found, that provides the most bang for your buck, is the ATI Radeon 9600 pro (256MB) or the 9600 xt (128MB), whichever is cheaper that day. Believe it or not, the xt is a better card, even though it has less RAM on the card. Anyway, I have the 9600pro 256 and I can run Doom3 in ultra mode, and I can run Half Life 2 with almost everything turned all the way up (graphics wise.) Now, take into account my system is a lot faster than yours is… AMD 3200+ and 2 gig of ram, but with my specs I can pretty much be assured that my Vid Card is the bottleneck. Knowing this, I can rightfully be pretty happy with its performance.
As to price, I see this card on sale all the time. A quick search tells me that the 9600pro 128 MB is going for just over $100 US, and I found one at newegg for $93 (manufactured by sapphire, who I trust.) So if you’re looking for a card that will hold you over until you upgrade your whole system, that’s who my money would be on.
I’m probably going to have to update my process or and motherboard, but the motherboard may not be able to upgrade much higher, which means I’ll probably have to replace the motherboard.
The reason I’m thinking more along the lines of video cards is because the one I have now is fricken ancient, much moreso then anything else on the system(I built a custom system years ago, and the video card was old then).
I can’t play anything that doesn’t support Voodoo3(and since voodoo went out of business, I can’t get updated drivers for DX8-9). Which means I have C&C Renegade and NOLF2 that I can’t play because Voodoo3 isn’t supported.
How urgently do you need to buy? And what is your budget? The industry is in transition from AGP to PCI Express and from 32-bit to 64-bit. For a games machine, I’m rather partial to the Shuttle systems - the new SB86i looks very cool - for the simple reason that they’re easy to take to LAN meets.
For modern games you’ll want a Radeon 9600 / GeForce 5700 or better, and preferably very much better.