I currently have a Dell P4 1.7Ghz with a Gig of RAM and an Asus Radeon 9600XT Card. I'm upgrading to a dual core Pentium D thats on a board with 2 SLI PCI-E slots. I'm not going to be using hte SLI right away, so i'm looking for a PCI-E card that has the perfomace equivalent to my 9600XT, since I do play some MMORPG's and don't want to start lagging. I'm open to ATI or Nvidia cards since i'm not making use of the SLI features right now. I would like to keep it on the lower end of the budget but will consider anything. Any suggestions?
Well what is your actual budget? You may be able to get a better PCIe card to the 9600XT for the money.
For a budget card, you can't go wrong with a Geforce 6600GT. If you have a bit more tp spend then a 7600GT would play all sorts of games nicely. But it does depend on your budget, the 9600XT is an old card.
you're 3 best bets are either Geforce 6600GT or XT,6800GT, or 7600GT depending on your budget, and make you sure you look at the amount of pixel pipe lines the card you are going to buy has because for MMORPG's you need alot for more detailed environments
ATi's X600 is basically the 9600 in PCIe format instead of AGP. The X700 and 6600GT are better performing, and take the place of the 9600/X600 and GeForce 5600/5700. The Radeon X1600Pro or XT is very comparable to the 6600GT and X700's. The GeForce 7600GT out-performs them all. However, the X1600Pro, 6600GT and X700 can be had for around the $100 mark online.
Well I would like to spend no more then $200 right now, but if there is a significant reason i can stretch that a tad. At this point i'm looking for the most bang for my buck. An All-In-Wonder model would be nice but overall graphics performance is the most important thing.
