Satisfying FPS
The (OEM) Sapphire brand PCI Express x16 graphics card with ATI Radeon X850 XT (256mb) arrived yesterday. It was quite simple to get installed - the difficult part being prying the computer case peripheral slot cover plates out of the chassis so I could actually plug a card in. The card needs 2 slots - one is the PCI-e card itself and its
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http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/07/05/vga_charts_vii/page4.html
I had a $200 budget, so I had to go all the way down to #13 on Tom's PCI-e list before anything was that cheap from Newegg.
The "good ol' workhoss" Radeon is the X800. Apparently it overclocks well, there is a separate performance graphics driver available for it, and in an AGP 8x system it's about as speedy as AGP gets - eventually you need to get video memory to 256mb or more for greater performance with AGP.
Radeon models in the 800 series are very confusing. There's an X800 SE which is crap, not even worth much over US$50, then there's an X850 XT PE that is considerably better performance than mine but definitely costlier. Point is, don't think the X8xx series are basically alike. Even X800 and X850 series can be better or worse than each other depending on the letters following.
I assume since ATI is a Canadian company, you should have a vendor near you that has prices better than what Newegg might be, especially since Newegg is quoting me US$ and shipping to Canada may be expensive through them. If you have a US $200 budget, you may find a Radeon X800XL with 256mb DDR3 and AGP interface within that budget, which places it at pole position #5 in Tomshardware.com AGP list, which isn't bad since I had to settle for #13 in the PCI-e list.
Don't buy a "faster" card with 128mb (or less) memory. They should always be outperformed by cards with more memory imo. Some benchmarks are too wonky.
An nVidia 6800 Ultra would be the top choice, but lotsa luck getting it under CDN$500.
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