New, Cheap Video Card?

Hi guys! My GW computer has a GeForce 4 MX440, and when I'm playing the Kaineng Center areas, I run into trouble. (i.e. if I have 7 h/h with me and I'm fighting more than, say, 4 mobs, the sound stutters, the screen jumps, and sometimes the fight is over while I'm still paralyzed and can't see/hear what's going on much less play.) Thus, I'm shopping around for a new graphics card!

I have an old Dell Dimension with an AGP 4X slot, no free PCI, and no PCI-e at all. The system has 512 MB RAM. I'm also a poor college student who's paying her tuition in January, so I want to keep this low. Given budget constraints and the computer's age, I'd like to keep it under $50, but still get performance where I can actually play any of the storyline past Kaineng Center. I was looking at cards on NewEgg because they have great prices. Anyone want to pop over to NE and look at sub $50 AGP cards for me and tell me what's best? I know nothing about cards.

Right here is going to be the best within 50-60$ range on AGP slot.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814131227

I know that you are on a tight budget, but adding another 512MB RAM would'nt hurt either. I'm not an expert, so i can't say for sure which of the RAM or the video card will give the best performance boost. From personnal experience, adding more RAM to my system improved things for me, but it's hard to compare since i have a GeForce 6600Go.

EDIT: since the sound causes problems too, it may be related to more than the video card. You can also try adding command lines like -noshaders to reduce the toll the game takes on the video card.

I've run GW with none of these problems on my roommate's system, which is a 512MB RAM comp, same as mine, with a Radeon 9550. (I think it's either 128 or 256MB). It's playable without the problems, which is why I'm fairly sure it's the video card. All my settings are on minimum already. I can probably afford RAM later, but since my GW is fairly ugly, if playable, I'd rather do the graphics card now and wait till March or so to ask for more RAM.

I got this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814102043
Awhile back because my crap-tastic Dell couldn't load Vabbi, and its worked very well for me.

The best solution is 7950GT from Nvidia, since its fasterst AGP card.But for 50-60$ try to get 7300GT from Nvidia.It will run GW just fine.If u have a litlle more money get 7600GS or 7600GT from Nvidia.AGP versions of course.

I just upgraded from the same thing you dide, the mx440. I bumped up to a GeForce 7300GT and I run everything on max with no problems @ 1440x900. I got the card at a decent price and GW is the only thing I play, so I had no need to overkill. And without a PCI-E slot and having to deal with an AGP slot, its not worth it buying a really high end card. Most of the 7 series comes with an AGP form. Id look into saving a little more cash and getting something along those lines, its well worth the wait.

RAM definitely would not be a more significant performance boost, especially since the OP already has 512MB. 1GB would be better, but if the video card isn't at least decent, then adding system RAM isn't going to solve the problem. Besides, a new video card would have around 256MB of VRAM easily, which would alleviate pressure on system RAM.

The Radeon 9600 that Ec]-[oMaN posted is a very, very solid GPU that would run Guild Wars decently at medium settings, and would be a vast improvement over a Geforce 4 MX440. As I recall, the MX440 wasn't even good compared to other Geforce 4 chips. In fact I remember a lot of games specifically stating that the MX440 was unsupported, even when it was relatively new.

i think you should save some more money because for 50-60$ wont change alot.

right click the game short cut after the target make a space and put in -dx8
your computer should run gw better on dx 8

AGP based card solutions do not utilize the VRAM fully, so RAM is far more important in this case.

Caha, run this program for me please and post results for it here.

http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=1391

I've got a hunch about your PC that I need to verify or disqualify. Don't listen to anyone before you run and post results, as you could just be wasting what little money you have as a college student (I know your pain. :P)

The MX440 is a DX7 card. It has no support for DX8 shaders any more than for DX9.. I'd be kinda surprised if even running GW in DX8 would give much of a performance boost.

That $55 Radeon 9600 Pro is a well-known DX9 card that would make a huge difference.

Rahja, what hunch do you have? Also, what tests should I run with the program?

I have a hunch about the RAM circuitry on your motherboard in addition to the rails on your Power supply as well as fablvl/epull on your devices. I fit proves to be true, I may have foul news for you. Let us hope my hunch is wrong.

Create a new report.

Select the options as follows:

Computer Overview
Mainboard
Plug and Play
Mainboard Configuration
Processors
Buses and Devices
Power Management
System Resources
Displays and Adapters
Physical Disks


The others you can uncheck.

On the next menu, I am going to need to see the following:

Processor Arithmetic
Processor Multimedia
Multi Core Efficiency
Power Management Efficiency
File Systems
Physical Disks
CD-ROM and DVD
Memory Bandwidth
Memory Latency
Cache and Memory

Leave the rest unchecked.

On the next menu, check the following:

Operating System
Key Applications
Memory Usage
Processes
Modules
Services and Drivers
Components and Objects
DirectX
OpenGL
Environmental Variables

Again, leave the rest unchecked.
The next menu I need nothing from, so uncheck them all.


Generate the report saving it to your PC as a .txt file. Email it to me as an attachment. My email is [email protected] (this is my spam email address anyways...)