Suggestions for NVIDIA card

[RageOfOrder]

Hey all

I'm looking at buying a new Video card in the next couple months and I'm sick of my ATI Radeon 9600SE. ATI just provides shitty drivers, so I think I'll go NVIDIA. Always had better luck with them

In any case, My motherboard doesn't support no PCI-e, so it has to be AGP. Preferrably under $200 CDN since I'm on a student budget here. This isn't so much for gaming, but running Beryl and whatever else I might need to do with it. As long as it's better than my 9600.

Computer specs:
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ 1.8GHz
MSI K8T Neo2 MS6702e motherboard
600Watt Okia PSU
1GB DDR RAM
200GB Western Digital SATA HDD
80GB Seagate SATA HDD
( adding a 320GB Seagate IDE HDD soon )
LG 1780Q ( 17", 8ms) DVI LCD monitor

Currently looking at:
7600GS $199
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...And then stuff happened.

[MrBlond83]

I'm exactly in your situation: I have an Athlon XP 3000+ and Asus a7n8x-e deluxe motherboard that only supports AGP x8, and I do not intend to completely replace half of my hardware for a new system right now as I'm happy with mine. And I am tired of my ATI Radeon 9800 pro because of the lack of support, not just in modular xorg but also various compatibility issues in Cedega.

Sad to say it's not easy to find helpful reviews of AGP cards considering PCIe is the new standard out there. Also, having used ATI cards for the past several years, I am quite unfamiliar with the card makers, as there are many vendors that make cards with the Geforce chipset. I was recommended XFX and Gainward cards, and they are available in my country (Israel). I am sure in Canada there is a broader selection of cards.

It seems that the latest chipset that is available on AGP cards is the 7800GS+ chipset. I did not see a XFX card with that chipset in their website, but Gainward has this : http://www.gainward.net/products/product.php?products_id=48

From looking at tom's hardware VGA charts, which has very few AGP cards anyway, it seems that this chipset actually performs reasonably well considering it's yesterday's technology. It does seem anyway that Geforce try to confuse people very much with their model names - for example I was warned not to buy models ending with "XT", as those are previous models with improvements and not real models of the series they are named. Pretty nasty to try and fool customers with that, I think

I will be looking at this post carefully as I still haven't decided which card to go for. Sadly, I could not find a good place with benchmarks to see how the AGP models compare to my current radeon 9800 pro, and to each other. It seems all benchmarking websites are too focused on pcie cards