Video Cards-looking for a Good Deal

[funnelfan]

I've been wracking my brain for the past couple of days doing research on Video Cards. I'm looking for the something in the $100-200 range with the target price of $150. I need it to be a 8x AGP card as well. One thing I've noticed is that card number don't exactly correspond to the card preformance. For example the ATI X800 is a much better card than the X1300. I've been scouring over the raw specs, focusing in on the Core clock speed, process, and memory bandwidth. His is a good place for the raw specs

http://users.erols.com/chare/video.htm

Also down near the bottom of the page is a listing of the cards that goes from least favored at the top, to most favored at the bottom. Now the Nividia 6600GT is probably the best card for the money ($130), but it has the drawback of only 128megs. But I just saw the 6800GS for ($180). Actually that's probably the best deal right there, look at the specs on that baby! ATI is just a joke, they want twice as much for the same preformance. Whatever you do, don't get this ATI Radeon 9550 that is being advertised for $70-90, it has worse specs than the GeForce 3 in my computer right now, and my card only has 64megs. It's probably going to take a ATI X850 or a X1800 to equal the 6800GS, but those ATI cards run in excess of $300!

Does anyone want to add anything to this? I think I'll buy a Nividia 6800 series card.

[Tristar54]

I did the same as you are doing, 2 weeks ago.

I bought a GeForce 6600GT AGP 8x for $140.

There's about 6 specs I look at when upgrading.

1. Number of pixel pipelines - the more - the better.
2. Memory interface - again the larger the better
3. Memory type and amount of it - this one was only 6600GT with GDDR3
4. Maximum resolution settings - this one 2048x1536 or close to that
5. Output jacks - DVI/Analog - TV out/in
6. Features of the card -software bundle with drivers

I just upgraded from a 4 pixel pipeline GF5200FX 128meg-64bit memory interface to this Asus GF6600GT 8 pixel pipeline 128meg-128bit memory interface. Performance has been more than doubled and close to tripled with certain settings.

I've always bought Asus brand GeForce cards as they are quality cards and are easily overclocked

This board was my choice as the best one for the price.
My only bottlenecks now are my older CPU-Athlon 1.2gig and main memory-133mhz-SDRAM.

[ragtimer]

I have an ATI Radeon 9200SE which cost about $50.I often get close to the MSTS max framerate (60) and minimum generally 20-30.There is no point in a better spec than that because over about 20 fps you cannot tell the difference.

[derekmorton]

Tomshardware has charts of video cards.
http://www.tomshardware.com/site/vgacharts/index.html

[cyclone1234]

*deleted, repetetive of other posts*