noob needs help here!!!!

[cashmoneyga]

I am a total noob when it comes to buying a graphics card. So i need some help. I am looking for a graphics card that will give me fast game play and good graphics. Mainly i want fast smooth gameplay. Just incase anyone need to know, I have a 1.73 gigahertz amd athlon and 256mb ddr ram. Another question is wether i should use pci or agp. Does anyone know which is better? One last thing, can someone go to the bestbuy site and tell me if "BFG Technologies GeForce FX 5200 256MB" would be a good card or not.

Any repies are apreciated, Thanks

[cashmoneyga]

The price range I am looking for is $100-$160

[Redwolf]

Okay...let's see now:

AGP over PCI, definately. All an AGP slot is is a modified PCI slot connected directly to the north bridge (?) for faster transfer of information (much ,much faster). If your board has an AGP slot, you want an AGP card.

In the $100-$160 dollar range, you may be able to find a Radeon 9500 or 9600 (for some strange, strange reason, the 9500 is the better card, but it is out of production now). If not one of those, then the Radeon 8500 is a great card (skip everry card between 8500 and 9500, they are all budget cards that aren't very good...go figure). Of cousre, Radeon cards are all made by ATI, ans dome other companies make them too.

[cashmoneyga]

Thanks. Does anyone have anymore suggestion or help. I want all I can get.

[John Prophet]

what you need to do is "bump" this thread tomorrow in the daytime....its hard to get any responses this late, lol.

just bump it once though, so you dont get fussed at....

JP

[DallasDon]

You definatley don't want a Fx 5200 for the newer games.

Of the two main manufacturers of chip sets, there is Nvidia and ATI.

The minumum for good gaming in the Nvidia is the Ti 4200 or higher.

Ati is probably the more popular, mainly because of the overclocking capabilities, pushing the budget cards (once the top of the line) to produce a little more performance.

Actually, I think you should do a New EGG category search for ALL video cards, then sort by "votes", and scroll down to your price range. Then read the reviews of purchasers. A little tab at the bottom of each item says 'read reviews".

In your price range, you probably want to "get the red one". Actually , it is a mid range card on a 6 layer pcb, and has more overclocking potential.

Reading all the reviews will give you quite an education.

[Bob The Great]

also later on you might want to look into more ram for games. 512 is the sweet spot right now for price/preformance. For now like has been suggested a 9500-9600.

[Omardeth]

forget the radeon 9500 they are just to hard to find and if you do find one they will want alot for it . like it was stated in an earlier post it isn't made anymore . the radeon 9600 replaced the radeon 9500 . the 9500 was way to good so they stoped making it . it performed so close to the higher end cards that ATI was also making they were losing sales of the higher end cards .

the 9600 is a very good mid to uper midrange card and you will be very happy with it . the fx5700 is also a nice card for about the same price as the 9600 . DON"T look at any card that has 256mb of memory . you aren't going to get any better performance from a card that has 256mb of ram .

if you can't put out the money for a 9600 then i would get a ti4200 . it is beter than the radeon 8500 . it is also around 100$ or less . i am typeing on a pc that has a ti4200 in it and it plays games like everquest very well .and if you have ever played everquest you will know what it is like to go into a zone with alot of people in it . you lose FPS big time if there are alot of people in the zone . and the ti4200 rarely lags .

if you can put the money out for a radeon 9600 i would go that way or a fx5700 . if you can't get a ti4200 .

[Shifter2101]

what about the card that came with my machine?
NVidia GForce4 480 Go
Is this one any good, r, should i think about replacing it w/ something better?

[cashmoneyga]

I was looking at the ATI RADEON 9600 SE 128MB AGP Graphics Card and was think about getting it. What does everyone think about it?