Looking for a PCI video card

[monster64]

A friend of mine is looking to upgrade his old HP. He is on a really tight budget of $30-50. All he wants to do is just RUN newer games like AOE3 and CS:S. My 32 meg radeon 7200 ran CS:S just fine, and thats the kind of card he's looking for. Because of the damn Intel Extreme graphics, there is no AGP slot what so ever on his i845. The only slots he can use are PCI ones. And so, I'm looking for a PCI card. Iv'e looked at the FX 5200 and the Radeon 9250, and both are around $50. Anyone know either any PCI card that is eitehr worse and cheaper, or better but still around $50. I looked around ebay, but not exactly being a speacialist on PCI video cards I wasn't too sure what to look for. And anyways, a PCI search gets me all the PCI-E cards and I'm not going to look through 2000+ cards to find the right one. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Oh yes, and a few more things. He only has 256mb of pc 2100, so I'm wordering if in source/aoe3 more ram or something better than his 64mb intel extreme will be best. I found a 256 mb stick for $25 shipped on newegg. Looking for cheaper (>$20.) Again any help would be great. He is only going to play single player too, so I was thinking the ram over the video card but I just don't know.

 

[jevans64]

Try this Newegg link for a list of all available PCI video cards.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductLi...=48&propertycodevalue=696:9642&bop=and

The FX 5200 or Radeon 9250 are the best you're gonna do for under $50.

The Intel ( not so ) Extreme chipset uses system memory for its buffer. Going to a video card with its own memory will be much better. It wouldn't hurt to throw in another 256 MB RAM stick to keep the system from caching. You'll want to disable the onboard graphics ( in the BIOS ) to free up that system RAM.

 

[monster64]

Out of those, which one is better. He will be mostly playing CS:S and AOE3. Can't find any benches of the fx5200/9250 running source.

Also would there be much difference in performance between the PCI 5200 and the agp x4/x8 one? I'm thinking no, since its an old card and I don't think it has too much data to transfer.