help with graphics card compatability

sellingmysoul666

I have a 2 year old pc & the graphics card failed on me yesterday
the local pc shop fitted an old card as i wanted it working again for christmas but it has crashed a few times & slowed everything down so i am looking to spend up to £100 to get a reasonable one

I did have a nvidia geforce 6200 turbo cache pci express version 1 which could cope with the few games we have

i have looked at a few new cards and they are version 2 are they totally backwards compatable?

the AMD Radeon HD 3850 is getting some good reviews but something older would be okay

i also want to get some memory from crucial while i'm in the mood for spending money on the pc

any help would be great & merry christmas

spec
> Manufacturer : evesham.com
> Mainboard : eveshamvale K8 Neo4
> Chipset : nVidia nForce4
> Processor : AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ @ 2000 MHz
> Physical Memory : 512 MB (2 x 256 DDR-SDRAM )
> Video Card : ATI Technologies Inc Radeon 7000 Series (RV100)
> Hard Disk : WDC (200 GB)
> DVD-Rom Drive : SONY DVD RW DW-Q30A
> DVD-Rom Drive : SONY DVD-ROM DDU1615
> Monitor Type : ViewSonic VA902 - 19 inches
> Operating System : Microsoft Windows XP Professional 5.01.2600 Service Pack 2
> DirectX : Version 9.0c

epz_2

upgrade the ram as well, its buttons these days.

i would look up the benchmarks for the games you are interested in, im more interested in notebook gpus but from what i hear £130 gets you a nvidia 8800gt which overclocks like hell and with some more ram your rig would play any game except crysilis on high cause nobody can do that grr.