need input on which graphix card to buy

i have an athalon xp 1600 cpu and an asus k7v266-e motherboard. its 266 fsb and ihave about 1gb of pc2100 ram on it. The agp slot only holds 4x so my question is which card out there would best improve my gaming experience....i'm going to be playing everquest 2. Ive been looking at geForce 4 Ti's. im not to familiar with ATi's however. Im going to be purchasing the card from ebay and i dont really mind if its used because i'll eventually be getting a new computer. Soooo, the question is: What is the best graphics card that i could find for about 50 bucks on ebay given the information above?

ps: ive seen some geforce 4 ti-4200s for about 30-40 bucks, but there is a big jump in price when i look at the 4400/4600's. input please.

 

maybe 5 fps increase for the 4400 and 5 more for the 4600, not worth the price

 

Well the Ti4600 has faster memory as well as faster core & clock speeds. As far as being able to play Everquest, I would think the Ti4200 would do just fine for that.

 

That is totaly not true. Between the 4200/4400 and the 4600; the lower two are the same core; while the 4600 is an improved version over the other two and has a substantial gain on them. IE a 5600 vs 5700 imrovement isnt just '5 fps'. You shouldnt give out info if your not sure what your talking about.


http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/20021218/vgacharts-01.html

 

substantial gain huh. 1 fps in unreal tournament!

 

review was put in 2002; drivers gain and improve over time

 

cool, thanks for the input guys. i guess i better atleast clear up that i want this new card to play everquest II. It has some newer requirements like dx9, Pixel shader and vertex shader compatible hardware. Also, the link was very helpful omegamerc! seems like the ati cards are always edgeing out the geforces. are radeon 9700's 4x? what kind of 4x ati's were good and might be a good solution to my problem?

 

9700 are 4x agp and 8x agp compatible. As for how much youll find em on ebay that would be up to the seller. 9700pro is always better then a standard one; and dont buy LE/SE cards.

 

ok thanks for the info! i guess my final question is: do the 9700's run at the same efficiency in 4x as in 8x? my guess would be not so does this mean that there isnt much point in going for one?

 

well thats like saying im going to buy a 1985 car over a 1996 car because the 1996 car probably wont run like a 2004... Your still getting the performance improvements and dx9; i doubt that its bandwidth will be that high that performance is adversly affected.

 

I agree that you wont notice much difference between 4x & 8x on your machine. Now if you were to have say an 8x AGP slot with an 8x card set to.....4x in the BIOS, then you would see a difference, but as is I really don't think it will make any difference.

Now if you are wanting to go with a 4x card only, I would go with an Nvidia Ti series card. ATI cards have only recently started coming into thier own. I had a Ti4200 8x card running on a motherboard that only had a 4x slot & I didnt see any performance difference at all.

Now having said that..............Omegamerc is correct in saying that with a newer card you will get DirectX 9 support that you won't have with an older style card.

Decisions, Decisions, Decisions hehe

 

Oh yea I meant to ask what card are you running now?

 

thanks again for the great info, i think im starting to see the picture more clearly now. and to answer your question suesman, im running a geforce2 ti w/64mb ram. ive been tracking ebay and it seems like there is way too much competition for the ati cards right now anyway. everquest is sponsored by nvidia so im pretty sure they design there games more specificly for the nvidia cards and drivers. i had a lot of success in everyquest 1 with my current card so im confident i will have equivilant success in eq2 w/ a geforce 4ti thanks for everyones help!

 

"everquest is sponsored by nvidia so im pretty sure they design there games more specificly for the nvidia cards and drivers."

Not really, it is more of an advertisement than an endorsement.

Another thing. A GeForce 4 Ti card does not support DX9 and if Everquest 2 needs those to run, then you won't be playing it on a Geforce 4 Ti series. If you want a good Dx9 card, you can get a Radeon 9800 Pro w/ 128 Mb for about $200. IMO, it's the best bang for the buck on the market. And you can just transfer it to your new computer when you upgrade.

 

I just checked on the requirements and you should be good with a Geforce 4 as long as it has 64Mb. And AFAIK, they all have at least 64Mb.