Looking for a decent video card

[LuckyTaxi]

Help a "n00b" out will ya? I havent had a desktop in over 4 yrs and now I'm sick of using my laptop as my everyday system. I just got my hands on a used Dell 4700. I'm going to beef it up to 2gb of RAM w/ WinXP and would like a decent video card for it. The mobo can accomodate PCI Express 16 or 1 and my budget is between $100-$200. It might not seem much but I'm just looking to play some games on it. Nothing crazy like WoW but something that can handle let's say Civ 4 or Command & Conquer.

I have a 22" Samsung (DVI) and a 19" WS Hanns-G. I do know I want a NVIDIA chipset in case I want to dual boot w/ Linux. Will I be fine w/ 256mb or should I go w/ 512mb?

 

[secretanchitman]

8800GT/9600GT/3850/3870.

 

[LuckyTaxi]

I see a lot of cards with DUAL DVI, how well do the converters work? let's say I get a card that has dual dvi but one of my monitor is VGA.

 

[aggressor]

They come with a little adapter that lets them output VGA

 

[LuckyTaxi]

Originally posted by: aggressor
They come with a little adapter that lets them output VGA

Would I lose "quality?" In the event i want to upgrade my VGA only monitor to a better one that has DVI I would just get a dual DVI.

 

[BassBomb]

You would not lose quality, you just lose "digital" which is ok if you are using VGA which is analogue

 

[krnmastersgt]

Isn't DVI supposed to be able to put out at a higher "quality" than VGA since the signal is digital? In any case yeah you can just use a converter which comes with almost every dual dvi card out there.

 

[BassBomb]

Originally posted by: krnmastersgt
Isn't DVI supposed to be able to put out at a higher "quality" than VGA since the signal is digital? In any case yeah you can just use a converter which comes with almost every dual dvi card out there.

DVI is higher quality, but that can only be noticed if his monitor can take DVI

Using a DVI -> VGA rather than a strictly VGA output from a GPU will show no difference on a VGA Monitor

Nowadays most if not all cards are dual DVI