Video Card suggestions PCI

[jussi]

I have an older dell comp with only PCI slots. I'm going to give it to my nephew and he does some gaming. What would be a good card to get. Seems like all the cards now are PCI-e.

Btw thanks for all the suggestions for a video card for my computer I asked last year. I ended up getting this one. Came out to $42 after rebates.

[JSUPreston]

I haven't looked lately, but I'm not sure you can find a PCI video card that would be adequate for gaming these days. From what I can tell, AGP cards are starting to get a little harder to find as well.

In my main machine here at home, I have an nVidia GForce 8500GT PCI-e x16 with 512MB RAM. It plays pretty much everything I want under XP at as high as resolution as the game or monitor will allow. Vista, not so good. I would think that this nVidia card might work for you: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814187057

However, as others can probably explain better, there is a lot more to gaming than just the video card, although that is a huge part. There is the disk i/o, speed of processor, amount of system ram, etc. Not knowing your current system specs, I would have to say that PCI is probably going to be the biggest bottleneck.

Hope I have either helped or confused the issue even more. Seriously, I hope that I've helped some. Also, I've had a lot of good luck at www.dell.com/dfo for buying refurbed Dells. Last machine I bought was a Vostro 200 slimline (same as Inspiron 530s with a black case). Came with 2GB RAM, a 250GB SATA drive, Core 2 Duo 2.4 processor and an ATI Radeon HD 2400 PCI-e x16 video card with 256MB. Got it for a little under $400 with shipping.

[Kristofor]

JSUPreston is correct. There are no options for a PCI video card that will perform well with any modern/demanding games.

Games tend to be the most system intensive applications that are commonly used on home computers (video/image manipulation, higher-end CAD stuff, etc. will also tax systems heavily, but games come out monthly that keep upping the bar).

If you're handing the machine off because it's too old for internet browsing, running MS Office, etc. it's probably not going to make much of a game machine. There are exceptions in old (3-10+ years) games that are still a blast to play, a tiny handful of newer games, and some 2D games which are much less intensive (my old 486 might not have enough oomph for a DeepBlue like competitive game vs. grand masters but it was enough to regularly beat me when it didn't need to worry about 8xAA, 8xAF at 1920x1600...)

It's also possible that your nephew may have another purpose for it (file server, web browsing while using a full screen app on his main machine, etc.). I'd ask him what games he's thinking of playing before spending money to upgrade to a card that would be much better than onboard, but probably not good enough for much that's new...

[jussi]

I'd ask him what games he's thinking of playing before spending money to upgrade to a card that would be much better than onboard, but probably not good enough for much that's new...

Good point. I'll ask him. Thanks for both of your help and suggestions.