I want to upgrade my video system, but I only have PCI slots on my motherborad. I cant use any AGP cards can I? If no, what card is an AFFORDABLE ugrade from my puney 4 meg onboard video? I am looking for something that will not only improve preformance on detailed graphics, but has enough ram to power it all...32 megs and up. Any Ideas? Ryan

There are plenty of good PCI cards, but it depends on what you consider affordable. I would look at the Radeon 7500 64MB or one of the GeForce cards. You can get them all the way up to 128MB (actually the 9700 is available with 256MB but that is overkill and way too expensive right now) Actually, just about any card in the world is going to be a huge upgrade from that 4mb thing you are using, even an old TNT Ultra card.

Like you my system does not have an AGP slot on the Motherboard ! It came with i810 intergrated graphics with the same 4MB of mem. I purchased an ATI RADEON 32MB PCI Graphics card , and the improvement to my systems performance was very noticable . ATI now has a 64MB PCI Graphics card. B/4 installing if your BIOS has the option to turn off the intergrated graphics do so .My BIOS did not , however you also should have your BIOS set to PCI frist . I disabled the intergrated graphics in device manager under display adapters and system devices , then rebooted and let the system install the standard VGA software. I then proceded with installing the drivers for the PCI Graghics card ! Good Luck,Nick

My brother bought a Geforce2 PCI. He plays games, no problems. Geforce 3 and 4 I have not seen in PCI format (it is likely they don't exist!) Radeon's are also good. You should get a good deal somewhere!

Hi Ryan. When considering what's available in PCI cards nowadays, you've got 2 popular cards to strongly think about upgrading to. 1) GeForce 2 MX400 64MB-PCI. These cards are available anywhere and sell for as little as US$40 on Ebay. You'll get reasonable performance (way better than what you get now!) for a reasonable price. 2) Radeon 7500 64MB with TV out-PCI. These cards offer slightly less than twice as much performance (175%) as the above GF2 model for about US$80 on Ebay but will make your eyes pop out when you see the difference between it and the crummy 4 MB onboard you are currently looking at. If I were you, and considering the decent computer you have, I'd have to say I owed it to myself to cough up a few extra twenties and go for the Radeon card, even if it meant having a bit less pocket money for a paycheque or two. After all, that pc has many years of use ahead of it. As a last thought, I would suggest you stay away from cards based on the TNT2, TNT, Voodoo 5 or Voodoo 4 based chipsets as none of them will perform better than even the GF2MX400.

GeForce4 mx420 or mx440, 64mb, good price and available with TV out. Great performance low price and available in PCI or AGP

AVOID those MX cards like the plague. I cannot believe anyone would tell you to even consider them.