Graphics card around £50 - any recommendations?

judosteffer

Hi all,

I have a 1 gig Compaq presario Athlon 3000+ processor - bought in 2003 and still going very strong. Runs XP a treat.

It has a Ati Radeon 9200 128 Meg graphics card which came with it- I play games such as Far Cry, Live for speed and War rock on it. I presume this is a pci card? Its in a slot on the motherboard as a seperate card anyway.

Is it worth upgrading the graphics card to play games better and encode camcorder footage faster? my budget is £50 max. Would I see much improvement on my current 9200?

For example it struggles a bit with Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory- could a new card play this really smooth?

or is it not worth upgrading at all?

Blacksheep1979

doubt you will see much improvement with a £50 card - also the video card won't help with video from a camcorder (generally)

banger9365

for £50 you can get some good cards that are a few years behide in the technology put if you play new games you will need a little more than £50 . it mite help if you now what slot it is AGP or pci-e or even on board graphics .
new graphic will not help with the camcorder

Mobeer

Maybe you would see an improvement. For your game the requirements are:
# Processor: AMD Athlon or Intel Pentium III 1.4 GHz (Athlon or Pentium IV 2.2 GHz recommended)
# RAM: 256 MB (512 MB recommended)
# Video Card: 64 MB DirectX® 9.0c-compliant graphics card

From this it might well be the graphics card that is limiting your performance. Scan are listing PCI express cards based upon the Nvidia 8500 and 7600 cards at around £60 or the AGP 7600 at about £62. Cards cheaper than these tend to be real budget models.

You need to check what type of graphics cards you can install.

opportunity_cost

The Connect3d ATI Radeon 9550 AGP 256MB is apparently quite a decent card for the £35 (or £25 if you use Google Checkout) it costs. It can be overclocked with ATITool, which should give you some extra performance in games.

Your motherboard probably has an AGP slot and no PCI-E slot (so an AGP card like the one above would be the type you need) but check your motherboard specs with PC Wizard 2007.

Cricri

I agree with BlackSheep. If you want a GOOD card for £50 (which I assume means you want performance with 3D games), you're out of luck.
What I did last year was buying a 9800XT of eBay for around £55, it's DX9 compliant.
Since most of the time I don't play games, it's overkill, so I actually downclock it to half speed with ATITool (the tool suggested by opportunity_cost just above) during normal office use to save energy and make my system cooler (and hence quiter since it's on 24/7).