video cards: what would you suggest?

  • Thread starter Thread starter bruce little
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bruce little

Hi all. I have a home-built system and I have been using an old Cirrus
logic PCI video card. After trying to run some new games, it has
become painfully obvious that this old card needs to be replaced.

I have an AMD/Asus system with an agp slot in the motherboard.
The make and model of the mobo is: ASUS A7S333 Sis745 Chipset DDR333
running an AMD AthlonXP 1600 (1.4 ghz) with 256 MB of RAM.
I'm unemployed at the moment, so money is a bit tight. Just looking
for something nice and affordable (under $60). Thank in advance for
your suggestions.
 
bruce said:
Hi all. I have a home-built system and I have been using an old Cirrus
logic PCI video card. After trying to run some new games, it has
become painfully obvious that this old card needs to be replaced.

I have an AMD/Asus system with an agp slot in the motherboard.
The make and model of the mobo is: ASUS A7S333 Sis745 Chipset DDR333
running an AMD AthlonXP 1600 (1.4 ghz) with 256 MB of RAM.
I'm unemployed at the moment, so money is a bit tight. Just looking
for something nice and affordable (under $60). Thank in advance for
your suggestions.
Click to expand...

Are you talking about a new card or used? For 60USD you can't get a
really good card. At this price point, I'd probably get a radeon 9000.
If you can up that 60USD a bit you can find Ti4200 64MB for about 80USD
- even though it's not newest generation, it's by far the card with the
best price / performance ratio nvidia currently offers (and also better
than anything the competition offers at this price point currently).
Other cards for 60USD include the radeon 9200 (exactly the same
featurewise/speedwise than the 9000 unless you're counting 0.1%
performance increases significant), but I'd prefer a 9000 (as it's
cheaper today), maybe you can also find a 9000pro for 60USD. Some Radeon
9100 can also be found quite cheap. However, be careful: there exist
some 9000 (mostly called 9000LE), 9200 (mostly called 9200SE) and 9100
(almost impossible to distinguish from the real version) which have only
64bit memory busses, avoid those like the plague!
Maybe you can also find a nvidia GFFX 5200 for 60USD, but the same has
to be said for this card: especially the cheaper ones usually only have
a 64bit memory and they might be hard to distinguish (depending on the
manufacturer) from the "real" 128bit version.
Anyway, all those cards (even the half-performance 64bit versions) would
be WAYS faster than that cirrus logic ;-)
And I forgot to mention, it really doesn't matter if you get a card with
64MB or 128MB, for those low-end cards (except the TI4200, but the 128MB
cards are quite a bit more expensive there) the higher amount of memory
is for marketing reasons only.

Roland
 
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