Need quick Vid card advice

[Johnbear007]

Ok here is the deal, the wife and I want to play Warcraft 3.. I am fine with a athlon xp 1700+ and a radeon 64mb ddr vivo


she has a p3 800 with a PCI 32mb S3 Savage 3

What would be the Cheapest reasonable solution to upgrade her card? she has no agp slot. I dont need advice on getting a new mobo etc, cant afford taht, just waht is a decent PCI card that can run war 3? this is on a 15 inch monitor, dont need high resolutions, as long as she can play at 8000 x 600 she will be fine, I DO NOT need a card for FPS games at all.... I need something in the budget range, no more than about 50$

 

[spanky]

what os is she running? first thing that comes to my mind was a voodoo5 pci. or a radeon pci.

 

[Johnbear007]

WinME

radeon would be better, I want something with driver support

 

[bockchow]

check the hot deals forum, i just saw like two threads about radeon 32mb ddr pci going for like 25-30 at walmart or compusa.

 

[bockchow]

this guy has a voodo 4500 pci for $30
and here's GF4MX420 PCI for $50 shipped
o and the radeon deals in hot deals was actualy for the sdr not ddr, sorry

 

[spanky]

there really aren't that many great pci gaming solutions out. have u considered selling the cpu/mobo and getting maybe a 1ghz duron/ecs k7s5a combo instead? then u could get something like a gf2 gts-v for like $40.

 

[FSUpaintball]

PCI is getting left in the dust; the best you'll find is a Radeon 7500 or something PCI. Nobody will EVER put out a better performing PCI card; it's reached it's physical limits of the hardware.

So, I suggest the 32mb Radeon that was on sale for $30 last week at CUSA. I'm not sure how much it is now. If it's too much, go for one of the newer Radeon PCI cards.

BTW, stay away from GeForce (never thought I'd say THAT) in PCI form. They're just not very good in PCI slots.

 

[Johnbear007]

I understand PCI vid cards are on thier way out.... just tryign to prolong the life of her system, without doing any other upgrades, we just cant afford to do any upgrades at this point, other than a cheap video card.. how well will that radeon 7000 run it?

 

[FSUpaintball]

Probably fairly decently. I've managed to run it very well on a GeForce 2 MX 32MB card (a Prophet II) with a P2 400 and 256MB RAM.

 

[spanky]

the 7000 is based on the castrated radeon ve core. check out this chart

 

[Johnbear007]

I understand the limitations of the radeon, if I had more viable choices I would consider them.. like I said I just need it to be able to run decently

 

[spanky]

Originally posted by: Johnbear007
I understand the limitations of the radeon, if I had more viable choices I would consider them.. like I said I just need it to be able to run decently

try to pick up the radeon sdr.

 

[hans007]

Originally posted by: Johnbear007
I understand PCI vid cards are on thier way out.... just tryign to prolong the life of her system, without doing any other upgrades, we just cant afford to do any upgrades at this point, other than a cheap video card.. how well will that radeon 7000 run it?

the radeon 7000 sucks. its a radeon ve pci. doesnt even have a t&l engine and has a 64bit data bus only. the cheap card at compusa at least is a standard radeon, so its a bit faster.


technically a ddr radeon 7000 pci and a radeon 7200 pci 32mb sdr (which is what compusa is selling basically), have the same bandwith memory wise 2.7 gb/sec. but the core on the 7200 is a lot faster, its 2 pipes , with 3 texture units per pipe instead of the i believe 1 pipe with 3 texture units on the 7000. plus its got t&l.

 

[bockchow]

did they ever make a kyro II pci card? if they did that might work for him.

 

[Johnbear007]

still cant find much of anything... it looks like the radeon 700 sux, and most places charge 80$ for it retail. this card is honestly not worth more than 20 or 30$...... anyone selling a used one?

 

[spanky]

check FS/FT... i am sure someone out there hoarded a load of those radeon sdr pci cards.

 

[Johnbear007]

thanks, ill check FS/FT