Recommend an upgrade

[Poda]

What's are some of the cheapest video cards that are much better than a Geforce FX 5900 XT?

 

[Sylvanas]

Eww 5900. We need more info than that. What budget are you on, what games do you play, what are the other system components and when how long do you intend the upgrade to last.

 

[Dkcode]

8600GT
8600GTS

If your on AGP then an nV 7900GS, ATI 1950 Pro, ATI 2600 XT & ATI 3850 Pro will serve you well but they ain't as 'cheap' as the above.

 

[Munky]

Need more info.... What cpu? AGP or PCI-e?

Pretty much any semi-decent card these days will be a major improvement over a fx5900.

 

[imported_Kiwi]

Given how BAD all of the FXes really were, almost ANYTHING newer than they are will be better, at almost every price point. Only IGPs and the Geforce 6200A from either AMD or nVIDIA are any worse (given that the only reason to have owned an FX 5900 ought to have been for playing OpenGL games, of which there are almost none today), even an X300 has better Dx9 SM2 shaders, and we are now into SM3.

The AMD HD 2600 XT is quite reasonably priced for how much better it will be than that FX 5900.

 

[WT]

6800GS is an OK choice, assuming you can find an AGP version for under $50.

 

[Andrew1990]

Well pretty sure he has AGP since the PCIe versions of the FX series were speciall designated as such. Depending on his system he could get one of the following

Low End = 6600GT/6800le
Mid End = 2600XT/7600GT
High End = HD3850/7950GT

Of course the 2600XT is cheap and good enough for any AGP system and I would personally recommend this.

 

[WT]

I didn't even remember that I had popped a 2600 Pro into a customer PC last week (reminded by Kiwi) but that ran very well, and for $75 (85-10 MIR) for a 512mb AGP card, it seems like a good card for the money. Unlike my 6800GS recommendation, its new and has a warranty as well.

 

[imported_Kiwi]

Originally posted by: Andrew1990
Well pretty sure he has AGP since the PCIe versions of the FX series were speciall designated as such. Depending on his system he could get one of the following

Low End = 6600GT/6800le
Mid End = 2600XT/7600GT
High End = HD3850/7950GT

Of course the 2600XT is cheap and good enough for any AGP system and I would personally recommend this.

Other than Chaintech, the nVIDIA Partners went along with nVIDIA's names, which were "PCX" for a 5350 (same as a 5200), 5750 (5700), and a 5900, all Vanilla as far as suffixes (well, that's my recollection). Chaintech, however, chose to call them FXes anyway.

I always hate the idea of naming any LE/SE as a recommended purchase, because they are such deceitful dogs, imitating better cards while actually being crap by comparison.

Anyway, I chose to concentrate on the HD 2600 XT as being a better value. We are reaching the end of the third year since PCI-e replaced AGP, and I just don't see investing more than maybe $90, tops, in any system with a mainboard that old. It just can't be economically justified.

That's not to say that I don't actually have more working systems on hand that are still AGP and DDR1 (or SDRAM, PC-133 in one of them), than I do of PCI-e systems. But my "best" two are definitely running PCI-e . .