on the mobo there is an agp slot open, and 2 pci slots open. I'm looking for a graphics card and I need to know if I need to buy agp or pci?

Here is a pic of my mobo. click

Get an AGP card and save the PCI slots for future addons. Anyway, PCI will be obsolete before long (if it isn't now).

Go for AGP. AGP is a dedicated video bus running at 66 MHz. PCI is a shared bus running at 33 MHz. No competition.

Make sure you get an AGP card that is compatible with your motherboard. There are different versions of AGP and they are not all compatible. The motherboard manual will tell you which type you need.

Stuart

if you buy a modern powerful agp card you ought to check your Power Supply Unit as some of these cards demand a lot of power and a lot of PSUs can not provide enough power.
(AGP is much better than PCI, that is why the AGP slot was invented because the slow data transfer speed of PCI was a bottleneck hindering good graphics card performance - PCI cards exist for those motherboards that only have PCI slots, don't confuse PCI with PCI-Express, theye are totally different from eachother)

I have been told by pros at a place that builds custom systems all the time you don't ever need more than 350 watts PS capacity if your mboard has no PCI-E slots, unless the computer is a heavily loaded server.

I have/have had several socket A (462) mboards similar to yours and the systems they are/were in work fine with a 250 watt PS and an AGP card, although no AGP card I tried had the need for an extra power connector from the PS.

In any case, even if the AGP card needs an extra power connection, they do not draw anywhere near the amount of power that some PCI-E cards which need an extra power connection do. 350 watts will easily handle any such card with your mboard, and 300 watts probably will too.

The best--and possibly last--AGP card on the market is the Radeon HD 3850 from AMD. Unfortunately, you won't be able to get it to perform NO WAY near its full potential with your significantly outdated Athlon XP 1800+ based machine :-(

Perhaps you need to tell us why you are contemplating this upgrade.

- Are you a gamer?

- What type of games are you into?

- What card is in the PC now?

Regardless of your answer, I don't think you can do any better than this deal.

Jabbering Idiots: Everywhere You Look!