Legit Reviews

Yes thats right im looking for the best PCI (not express) videocard I can buy right now. Im upgrading my girlfriends computer and while id rather just build her a new one her parents got this one for her and she feels obligated to use it, Its a dell it has a 2.8ghz Pentium 4 and had 256 mb of DDR2 400 that ive since upgraded to 768 mb. Now the main bottleneck is the integrated Intel video chipset that sucks more then anything has ever sucked before. Ive seen a few PCI Vid cards on the egg but they are mostly ATI but since im an NV guy I know little about ATI card and I was hoping someone could recomend a PCI Vidcard (NV or ATI) that they might have worked with. Im not expecting anything great (or even good for that matter) Alternativley if someone knows a pci express x1 videocard that would also work, her mobo has two pci slots and one pci-x x1 slot.

Using this one in a couple machines here in the office for couple months and not having any issues with them as of yet. Used them to upgrade some Dell's that didn't have an AGP slot so they could run the new version of autocad.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814129062

also if you use this one you have to disable the on board vid (if the mobo has it) inside windows for it to work right.

Yeah I saw that one but it seems expensive for a PCI videocard, how would it perform against this one?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814170114

one site said the 6200A did 82fps on far cry on low settings but it was an agp part not the pci part

for the pci x1300 another site said it did far cry on low at 50fps which makes me lean towards the 6200A which is also half the price of the the x1300 for pci.

with that said though the x1300 has a superior 128bit memory interface vs the 6200a's 64 bit and the x1300 offers 256mb of DDR2 versus the 128 of DDR on the 6200A but regardless of the memory interfaces the 6200A got higher fps in games but it was an agp part and I dont know what the performance difference is between the two busses.

HONkUS wrote:I dont know what the performance difference is between the two busses.

In a word, marked. The AGP bus is much faster than the PCI bus which is why it was created in the first place. What do you want this machine to do?

I'm not sure how it would compare. I don't think the card was that much when we bought them, I'm thinking it was on sale. I got those due to the fact the PCI GF cards I could find were not listed as "approved" cards by autodesk (they make autocad) so work wanted something that was on the list.

Why does she need a video card upgrade? Does she play games?

HONkUS wrote:Yes thats right im looking for the best PCI (not express) videocard I can buy right now. Im upgrading my girlfriends computer and while id rather just build her a new one her parents got this one for her and she feels obligated to use it, Its a dell it has a 2.8ghz Pentium 4 and had 256 mb of DDR2 400 that ive since upgraded to 768 mb. Now the main bottleneck is the integrated Intel video chipset that sucks more then anything has ever sucked before. Ive seen a few PCI Vid cards on the egg but they are mostly ATI but since im an NV guy I know little about ATI card and I was hoping someone could recomend a PCI Vidcard (NV or ATI) that they might have worked with. Im not expecting anything great (or even good for that matter) Alternativley if someone knows a pci express x1 videocard that would also work, her mobo has two pci slots and one pci-x x1 slot.

Diamond X1550 Pro is basically the best you are going to get for PCI.

Thanks for all the suggestions guys, yeah she plays battlefield but her bro kicks her but all the time because its really choppy on her machine and it looks aweful. Also im trying to get her into CS and maybe even quake and UT down the road. Again thanks fro the suggestions guys I will definatley look into the X1550 but also price is going to play a major concern. I might go with the 6200A just because ive played Source games on the 6150 embedded solutions at work and it runs fine but I don't know yet im still looking and that x1550 looks tempting.

HONkUS wrote:Thanks for all the suggestions guys, yeah she plays battlefield but her bro kicks her but all the time because its really choppy on her machine and it looks aweful. Also im trying to get her into CS and maybe even quake and UT down the road. Again thanks fro the suggestions guys I will definatley look into the X1550 but also price is going to play a major concern. I might go with the 6200A just because ive played Source games on the 6150 embedded solutions at work and it runs fine but I don't know yet im still looking and that x1550 looks tempting.

One of my friends used a X1550 Pro, and he played BF2 at medium/high and at 1024x 768. I think he got like 35+ FPS.

But he had a P4 2.4 Northwood.

Now he has 8800GTX(SLI) QX6700 and 4 Gigs of Crucial Tracer.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications ... &CatId=319
is a regular 6200, pci I think that might be better than a 6200 A, or the x1550 would work. Nothing is really an advisable choice as the cards are that great performance and limited by the bus. if you can find out the chipset core of the 6200 you might be able to unlock some stuff on it too and get better performance from it. like extra pipelines. the 6200 is probably the best for the price at least since it'll be about as good and more compatable than the fx5500. and newer series. the x1550 is just too expensive I think. any specific games she is looking to play on it?

Thats rough investing any kind of real money in a PCI card. I believe you would be better off using it as a net/web machine and building a different gaming rig. You could get used parts really cheap and even an older setup like a older AMD mobile rig on an N7-S MB would do wonder in comparison. Also AGP is still alive and kicking giving you much better future options where you will be maxed out with pci now.