PCA Forums

A friend gave me a HP 512X PC. Has a 1.3Ghz Celery 256MB ram 40GB hard drive, a burner and windowz win XP. the integrated Crap on it is no good for me, Soooooo, I figure an investment in $60-ish is worth it to get it running even the newest games without too much of a fuss. I eyed myself a gainward 128MB GF-FX 5200 for $72 But I was wondering if this truely is the best buy and what everyone else thought, because I'm lonely....

I have heard the 9200 Pro/Standard (NOT SE/LE) is more than a match. And you can find one with 128 mb of ram for about 50$.
I would also like to see what the folks around here think.

I would stick to Nvidia on those HP's. ATI does not like to play nice with the integrated video for some reason.

mebbe an 8500 or a ti-4200

i dropped a 9600 pro and an 8500 in a compaq with nvidia onboard without any problem

He said PCI heh.. I think the highest PCI VC I have seen is the R9000 series.. GL eGo

No one makes a PCI card with any decent performance - certainly nothing DX9 hardware compliant. Most video games now require AGP memory transfers or suffer terribly in performance.

Don't plan on doing any serious gaming with it.

If you hunt around you can probably still find a 9100 128MB PCI board. There's a 64-bit version as well that's a bit easier to find. Personally I'd hunt down a 9100 128MB, then go clock & bus shopping for a 9200 or 5200 w/ a decent core clock & 128-bit mem bus if I can't find one.
There's also a 5600 PCI, but it's well over $100.

I agree with Zandor. I've been looking around for a good graphics card for my daughter's Dell 2400 which doesn't have an AGP slot. The best performing PCI card that I have seen is a 9100. Although for a 4 yr old I think it's overkill. I'm tempted to get one of the AIW Radeon VEs for it so she can watch cartoons while I watch sports.