Replacing a Radeon 9700 series

[speedy2]

Friend has on in a P4 2.4Ghz XP machine with 1GB of ram. Mobo has intel 845G chipset. He plays games like Civilization. nothing FPS. What's a good replacement? The Radeon died. onboard works, but will it play games like Civilization?

 

[nemesismk2]

Friend has on in a P4 2.4Ghz XP machine with 1GB of ram. Mobo has intel 845G chipset. He plays games like Civilization. nothing FPS. What's a good replacement? The Radeon died. onboard works, but will it play games like Civilization?

The onboard should be able to play Civilization okay

 

[jdjbuffalo]

The onboard should be able to play Civilization okay

Sure, if you're talking Civ 1 or Civ 2 but not if your talking about Civ 3 or definitely not Civ 4.

That is a 5 year old machine. I would recommend replacing the whole thing for about $500 and he'd see a huge performance increase, even in a 2 year old game like Civ 4 (unless he only plays on small maps at low resolutions).

If he only wants a replacement video card then I would see about getting an AGP card off of ebay for $20-$30 or if he wants new one then get it from a place online like Newegg. However, he'll be paying a for a card on a dead socket. We've moved off AGP for a while and they don't make modern graphics cards with AGP.

I looked through Newegg and was surprised at how expensive these cards are since they are all old cards. The best I was able to find at a reasonable price was the SAPPHIRE 100298L Radeon HD 3450 512MB 64-bit DDR2 AGP 8X HDCP Ready Video Card - Retail for $49.99 : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814102862

If you decide to go with something else then I certainly understand but stay away from those GeForce FX 5200 or other 5000 series cards. I noticed a disturbing number of these still available. Those are absolutely terrible cards and I wouldn't recommend them to my worst enemy (I had one of these cards when they came out).

 

[WT]

I'd recommend an ATI AGP X850 card, either Pro or an XT model for a bit more. I try and snap them up for around $40 if they show up in the FS/FT forum every so often.

 

[Lazlo Panaflex]

speedy2, ygpm