A sensible Vid card matchup

[bobby46]

Opinions please: This is for a Pavilion (8755c) PIII 800mhz 256M PC. It now uses the 1Mb integrated mobo graphics. I was looking to buy an old, used (10-20 dollar) 32Mb pci graphics card for it, but see tempting ads for brand new 128 Mb PCI bus units at around 50 dollars. With the limitation of the PC being 800Mhz and inherent PCI bus limitations, are these new (nvidia fx5200 or radion 9250)128Meg cards overkill for this application? I don't expect to run newest games at highest resolutions, but wish to upgrade beyond its current sad capability.

[glc]

The 9250 is worth it as long as the power supply has enough guts to run it. Old used 32mb cards won't be much better than the onboard graphics. It may only use 1mb dedicated memory, but it tips heavily into the rest of the system memory for caching, etc.

[bobby46]

Thanks for the reply. I already shoehorned a 300w atx psu inside instead of that 185 watt mini after some metalwork to the case back. I just wasn't sure I could coax good gaming pixel rates from the 1999 has-been PC. A new vid. card it will be....Thanks again

[ikari120378]

Wow... my old system is a bit worse than yours: PIII 550, 256MB pc100, BUT with an AGP slot on the ASUS mobo. It's using a GeF 4MX 420 and works just fine wit older games like warcraft series and racing games like TOCA race driver, even though not in a great speed, and laggy in most. I awarded it as my most stable comp ever. That's why I'm still keeping it

[glc]

I have a customer that has a Celeron 900 on an Intel i815 micro ATX board - a business computer. He caught the game bug a couple years ago, and we put a PCI GF4 MX420 64mb into it (90 bucks at the time). It's not great, but a heck of a lot better than the onboard video. The Radeon 9250 should be better than that.

[ikari120378]

I agree that GeF 4MX series isn't that powerful. I'm not happy with that, but i meant that it's still working fairly well.
Nowadays I think people should consider radeon series for mainstream or low budget cards since I got myself an R9700pro instead of nVidia's GeFs series in the same class/level. The opinion is based on facts that most radeon series outperform most GeF series.
So, radeon series it is

[glc]

All depends on your definition of "low budget" and "mainstream". ATI has winners in certain niches and so does Nvidia.