Originally posted by: Googer
Originally posted by: MercenaryForHire
Originally posted by: trosty
Gents,
Which is the BEST PCI only GFX card that can be bought on todays market?
I have a couple of desktops that have no AGP or PCI-E and require one of them to be able to play FPS games online. The reason they have no AGP or PCI is that they are originally business PC's (albeit a flippin good spec!, less the GFX capability. Just to save a few pence on not having an AGP card added!)
I have been advised elsewhere that the best one is the NVIDIA 5700LE in PCI, although I can only find this model in AGP.
Your assistance on this matter is appreciated by myself and my 8yr old son who will ultimately benefit from it.
Welcome
trosty 
The elsewhere advise pretty much meshes with what to expect here.
Here's a link to a review written by our PCI Video Guy, Mloot.
The 5700LE is best only if you can get it in 128-bit memory form. If it's "64-bit memory" then it will be horrid. Look for a Radeon 9100 PCI as an alternate.
- M4H
That article is from 2003. Thanks for giveing bad advice.
/Rant on/
Googer, what's your problem? The OP asked for constructive advice on his purchase and all you can do is complain about how long ago the article was written? :| Just so you know, I don't work for any website, nor did I receive any assistance for the article, aside from some helpful advice given by a few wonderful people on how to lay out the review. The whole reason I wrote the article is because I wanted to help others who had been in my shoes. I didn't receive any compensation for the article, but what I did get was literally dozens of e-mails from people who, unlike you, were grateful that someone had taken the effort to put together an article affecting a segment of the market that had been largely ignored until then. Just who are you to judge, Googer? When you go and use over a grand of your hard-earned $ and spend over two months of using what little free time you have left after working 40 hrs a week and juggling a full college load to write a review, then you might have room to talk. Until then, keep your rude and unhelpful comments to yourself.
/Rant off/
Sorry for that, folks. I'm normally nice and cuddly on these forums, but Googer managed to get my dander up.
I would like to send a heartfelt thanks to M4H for his continued support. He was one of the few who supported the project from the beginning, and even offered to host the review on his own if I had been unable to find a review site to carry it. :thumbsup:
To the OP, most of the information in the review is still valid. Since it was printed, only a few newer PCI cards have been released. These consist of:
1. Nvidia MX-4000 PCI, which is just a re-worked GF4 MX card, and should be no faster than a normal MX 440 PCI
2. Radeon 9250 PCI, which is, for all intents and purposes, a Radeon 9200 PCI aka 9000 PCI, and should have no advantages over either of the previous incarnations
3. Nvidia FX 5500 PCI, which is basically an FX 5200 PCI, with slightly higher core (and perhaps memory) freqencies than a stock FX 5200 PCI. It should perform a little better than a 5200 PCI, but will not be as fast as an FX 5600 PCI.
4. Nvidia FX 5700 LE PCI. This is really the only "new" core (as M4H stated earlier) released for the PCI market in the last year and a half. In most cases, it will offer performance similar to the FX 5600 PCI, if you can find it with a 128-bit memory interface.
If you have further questions about any of the newer cards, or how they might perform in newer games, you might want to check out some of the VGA Roundups at Tom's Hardware. The roundups are mainly for AGP cards, but they cover alot of different models and, in most cases, the performance of the AGP models can be extrapolated to their PCI counterparts, once you take in mind the slowdown that the PCI bus places on them. Hope that helps a little.
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