Which card do you suggest?

Hi team.

I am looking at getting a new video card for my Dell PC. As it doesnt have any AGP or PCI-E slots I have to go with the old PCI cards. Unfortunately I am unable to afford a new PC as we have just bought a new house and my wife doesnt like the idea of adding a PC to the mortgage for some reason.

The two cards I am trying to decide between are a GeForce FX5200 and a ATI Radeon 9250.

Any suggestions/help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

ATI Radeon 9250.

I'm running the AGP version as of this time, runs fine.

i would suggest what i got for my sisters comp a BFG Geforce FX5500 OC 256 MB ram video card its like the fastest PCI video card you can get and it will put the ones you listed to shame just maybe harder to find cuz its the fastest of that technology and sought after for ppl who are still running PCI systems

its out of stock here but this is the card i'm talking about

http://www.directron.com/fx5500ocpci.html

better link with more info

http://www.dealtime.com/xPF-BFG_Tech...00OC_256MB_PCI

i bought mine used from a guy i know for 70 bucks canadian i think there like 150 bucks canadian brand new but not sure

PS if you do get this card make sure its the PCI version cuz BFG make the same card in both AGP and PCI and they even look the same

I would advise you to steer clear of any graphics card from the fx nvidia range...there are some issues with changing texture colour modes in counterstike source, and possibly other games, the whole fx series has dodgy architecture.

The Ati looks like a nice little card, and will run guild wars nicely

^^ It's why I said ATI, too many people have posted with an FX series card saying they have graphics rendering/texture issues.

i would have to disagre there on my 2nd PC i'm running a FX5600 and runs all my games fine and plays CSS just fine maybe thats just a problem with some cards but not mine i have tested it with like almost every game you can think of the only problem i had was with newer games but it wasen't a card problem it was just cuz the card is to slow and can't run the newer games very well and my sister uses her FX5500 for pure gameing and hasen't had a problem with any game yet just she complains cuz she can't play any of the new games cuz they just play to slow maybe your problem or other ppls problems was just with that certain card or just a bad batch of cards but i never had a problem with mine

Sad the wife will not let you use the mortgage to purchase a computer. You are able to "write it off" tax wise. People do that with their cars all the time. Why not a spiffy new computer....?

^^^agreed!! Mortage FTW!!!!!!

GeForce FX's poor shader 2.0 performance was evidence of bad architectural decisions.


The main problem, however, lies in optimizing DirectX 9’s High Level Shader Language (HLSL) for different chipsets. GPU’s have very deep pipelines, much like the Pentium 4. If shader code isn’t optimized to keep a pipeline busy throughout each clock cycle, performance will suffer. Right now, the Half-Life 2 shader code is not optimized for nVidia FX hardware.

The Geforce FX's main shortcoming was its use of FP32 precision for applications which requested full precision. Full precision underlined in Microsofts DirectX 9.0 specifications was to be a minimum of FP24. The only precision mode of the GeForce FX with respectable performance was FP16, but since it was partial precision, it was sidelined by application developers. The GeForce FX was then forced to run in FP32 where applications requested FP24 and hence performance was negatively effected to a very tangible extent.

I know what im talking about in this scenario, i have owned the 5500, 5600LE the 5900xt the 6600gt the 6600LE and the 7800gtx now

I would strongly suggest you go for an ATI card man, really