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Been awhile since a thread like this pop up. Which might entail good stuff that might have gone down in price. I don't know, you tell me, please.

My current card is a GF4 MX 440 and it is really putting a hurt on my Rome: TW playing. Seeing pointy legs up close is not a nice sight to see or weird bent shields.
Most of the video settings are minimal and it feels extremely pathetic and it can't handle a 1500+ soldier battle without really slowing down real bad.

I believe in the last thread the 9800 or was it 9600 card were the best under the $100 range, is that still so now?

If you can get a 9600(thats not 'SE' or something) under 100$, GO FOR IT. But I doubt you'd find a 9800 under 150$. Either way, those are both excellent cards.

http://www.geeks.com/products.asp?cat=VCD

Keep a close watch on that page.

At the moment I do see a 256 MB Geforce FX 5500 for $89, and a Geforce FX 5200 for $49 if you want to go really cheap.

Theres also a GeForce PCX5750 128MB for $95 and Radeon X300LE 256 MB for $97.99, but they require PCIe.

You can't get a good card for $100. Save up some more and raise your limit to $150. You can get a kickass card for that.

In this day and age, I would go no lower than a 9600 XT from ATI or a 5900 series from Nvidia. Anything lower than those suck for new games IMO.

THE best bang for the buck card on the market right now IMO is the Nvidia 6600GT, especially now that its in AGP format as well as PCI-E.

Avoid the 5200 line of cards like the plague, they suck big shit and are actually worse than a GF4 Ti 4200.

I think it'd be worth it to shell out a little more dough for a better video card. This is an area where just a little more cash can go a long, long way. I'd definitely aim for something in the $150 range, if at all possible.

One option you can go with is a nerfed 6600. It's only got a 64-bit wide memory bus (compared to the usual 128-bit), so it's slower than the regular GeForce 6600... but it's also only $120. I'm sure it'd beat the pants off a Radeon 9600 plain.

Icehawk wrote:In this day and age, I would go no lower than a 9600 XT from ATI or a 5900 series from Nvidia. Anything lower than those suck for new games IMO.

THE best bang for the buck card on the market right now IMO is the Nvidia 6600GT, especially now that its in AGP format as well as PCI-E.

Avoid the 5200 line of cards like the plague, they suck big shit and are actually worse than a GF4 Ti 4200.

I'm not so sure on that, recent games(even if you DON'T count HL2 as biased) show FX's as VASTLY underpreforming the 9xxx series, F.E.A.R beta for example, the 5900 FX could barely reach 10FPS in lowest settings, my half dead 9700 reached 20+ on those settings.

Praxis wrote:...a Geforce FX 5200 for $49 if you want to go really cheap.

I have no clue how the Geforce FX 5200 performs in games but I can recommend it from a noise perspective. It's basically the only reasonably-priced fanless nVidia AGP card. So if you're looking for low noise and you need nVidia (eg, you're running Linux and the Linux ATI drivers suck), take a look at this card. (But beware, not all Geforce FX 5200 cards are fanless, so make sure to see a picture of the card before you buy it.)

I'm using one. It's sorta a direct successor to the Geforce 4 MX 440 so the performance won't be mind blowingly better, but hey, I can play Jedi Academy with all settings maxed, and Battlefront with all settings high except AA off.

Ace Pace wrote:

Icehawk wrote:In this day and age, I would go no lower than a 9600 XT from ATI or a 5900 series from Nvidia. Anything lower than those suck for new games IMO.

THE best bang for the buck card on the market right now IMO is the Nvidia 6600GT, especially now that its in AGP format as well as PCI-E.

Avoid the 5200 line of cards like the plague, they suck big shit and are actually worse than a GF4 Ti 4200.

I'm not so sure on that, recent games(even if you DON'T count HL2 as biased) show FX's as VASTLY underpreforming the 9xxx series, F.E.A.R beta for example, the 5900 FX could barely reach 10FPS in lowest settings, my half dead 9700 reached 20+ on those settings.

It depends on the game, in Doom 3 the NVidia cards performed a lot better for example.

Praxis wrote:
It depends on the game, in Doom 3 the NVidia cards performed a lot better for example.

Okey, let me rephrase, discounting Doom3 and HL2(where there was alot of fishy buisness, like a small change in 1 line of a config file giving 50% better preformance on ATi cards), the newer games all have the 9xxx line beating.

The FX 5200 was actually a pretty good budget card, especially since it can be overclocked nicely.

The rest of the FX 5xxx series admittedly sucked in comparison, but the new 6xxx series is pretty good.

The 9800 does look promising just for a couple more twenties.

Though it is mute now because as of today, I just found out the date of which a trip to Six Flags has changed and thus I can now go. Which means no cash to splooge on upgrading. Not sure if I should be rejoicing or pissed that I will still have this old crappy card.

I will definitely look into the 9800 and the few others mentioned. Though I am looking for a card that is perhaps 50% more better than what I got now. I don't really want a small step-up as that wouldn't offer the bang for the buck for me and I probably won't be using it much after the summer anyway as I go to college and I may not take this sucker with me.

While we're on it though, which companies are the high and the low end of the video card business. I am noticing several different companies offering the same model card.

Ace Pace wrote:

Praxis wrote:
It depends on the game, in Doom 3 the NVidia cards performed a lot better for example.

Okey, let me rephrase, discounting Doom3 and HL2(where there was alot of fishy buisness, like a small change in 1 line of a config file giving 50% better preformance on ATi cards), the newer games all have the 9xxx line beating.

Well, if you are considering Linux, then ATi is vastly inferior in performance.

Soontir C'boath wrote:I will definitely look into the 9800 and the few others mentioned. Though I am looking for a card that is perhaps 50% more better than what I got now. I don't really want a small step-up as that wouldn't offer the bang for the buck for me and I probably won't be using it much after the summer anyway as I go to college and I may not take this sucker with me.

You'll pass 50% preformance increase in a heartbeat with the 9800 if you got the CPU to help it out.

Pu-239, I admit I don't have much knowledge of gaming on Linux, but I'm asumming when your talking gaming preformance, its on Windows.