Hey guys,

I have a Dimension 8200 with 2.24 Ghz P4, 1024 Mb PC 800-40 RDRAM, AGP 4x, and upgraded 410 W PSU. I'm looking to upgrade my graphics card to get a couple more years of service out of this system. I don't do much heavy gaming on this system but I would like it to be as powerful as possible so that it can hopefully handle anything currently on the market.

What is the best graphics card, in your opinion, that would be worth buying to optomize performance of this system? "Worth buying" is key...I don't want to buy an overly powerful card that my system can't fully utlize. I do, however, want a card that will make my system as powerful as possible.

Thank you for you help.

Welp... Theres one thing that may help us in order to help you

that is

What slots do you have available to put a GFX card in? because if you have an AGP card slot, that won't leave a whole lot of options of "current" however if you have a pci-e slot (or 2..) that would leave you wiht a ton of available options...


JW about that

I only have PCI slots and 1 AGP 4x slot. It's an aging system so no PCI-E... However, there are still some very good AGP cards currently being manufactured. These cards operate in the 4x/8x AGP slots, but I obviously can't take full advantage of their capabilities since I only have AGP 2.0. Which is why I'm asking this question...there are actually new AGP graphics cards that will be more powerful than my system can fully utilize.

So far I'm leaning toward a mid level ATI and I'm liking the VisionTek X1300 and X1600 XGE cards...like I said though I don't want to buy a card that is too good for my system because I could get the same overall system performance from a less powerful and cheaper card at that point.

I use this system for CAD and some simulation software. I'm also obsessed with the Total War series...so Medieval 2 would probably be the most intensive game this system will see. Preferably, I would like a graphics card that is Vista ready.

Quick search on newegg for what you were looking at came up with this

Personally I don't think this would exceed your computer enough to the point of where its falling behind, And in all honesty, even if it did, I doubt you'd notice since you're not playing that high end of games to begin wtih

Whether or not its vista ready, That's really beyond me, I haven't been keeping up with what cards are and what cards aren't, as I don't plan to purchase it, until well, they stop updating SP2 of XP

This is just after a quick overview of the card itslef by the way, And I wouldnt' fully ignore the issue that hte one guy had with 3 cards failing in 3 days, that's something that should be considered when looking at any card such as this

You can't really go much cheaper than this, well, you can, its at a mediocre price as it is and anything cheaper may in fact not do as well, that's just in my opinion atleast

The Extreme Gamer's Edition of that card is vista ready and is already over clocked for faster speeds I think. The reviews of that card aren't so hot and apparently there are issues when installing it in Dells...VisionTek's website alerted me to this.

I might go for the X1600XT 256 MB XGE AGP card:

256 MB GDDR3
590 MHz VPU Clock
1380 MHz Memory Clock
128 bit interface
256 bit ring bus memory controller
12 Pixel Shaders
5 Vertex Shaders

It seems much much better than the 1300 and if there's problems with the 1300 I'm not buying it. I think the biggest restriction here in my system is the fact my AGP slot is 4x instead of 8x.

Theres not too much difference between 4x and 8x. It does say that it has double the bandwidth, but in real life and with a system like yours, you wouldn't see much of a difference and 8x is backwards compatible. I know some people that actually switch from 8x to 4x to fix some problems.

Don't discount nvidia's side though. The 6800 is better than the x1300 and most x1600's

Can you send me a link to some info about comparable nvidia cards? I've been out of the know for a while when it comes to video cards. The 1600 appears to be much better than the 1300...the 1300 only has 4 pixel shaders in comparison to the 1600s 12? So the 1300 doesn't seem like it's worth the money... Also, if I went with VisionTek I have to like send the card into the manufacturer so they can tweak it to work with my 8200 because apparently their cards have issues with not posting in certain Dell models...

Nvidia 6600

Nvidia 7600 GS

there was a cheaper version of the 7600 I believe, however, I am not a fan of the heatsink only, As well, It'll heat up like a fire if you're running high graphics games or anyhting like that , a fan does much more good than just a heatsink will.

these are just 2 that I found, theres probably a wider array that you might want to look at

I too am a fan of Nvidia and I prefer them over ATI, because back when I made my computer ATI was basically still getting up int he world and there were a lot more reported problems with their cards vs Nvidia, Just my two cents

Hi There,

I have gone thru the same process with my Dell Dimension 2400. I got hold of a ATI Radeon 9250 PCI card. Problems is, the card requires a 64 bit bus. The Dell only has 3 x 32 bit slots meaning the card is useless. I'd be interested in knowing if anyone has been able to find a 32 bit PCI graphics card that is DirectX9 - compatible with pixel shader support.

cheers,
Chris

Oops sorry. Posted my last reply into the wrong thread!

C

Visiontek's 9250 is a very good card for approx $80 at wally world no pixal shader 2.0 though