Probably something NVIDIA, like GeForce FX 5900 or GeForce 6800. They'll get you the best game compatibility and will run anything old very well. Obviously not an FX card if you want to play D3D9 games.

Radeon 9800 or X800 would be ok too as long as you don't care about D3D5 and you don't want to play OpenGL games that aren't Quake-based. X800 does not have Win9x drivers however.

I second the recommendation of Geforce 6800, that what is what I have with an Athlon XP 2200. Very smooth gameplay in Hitman: Blood Money.

On the ATI side, I've been happy with a Radeon 9800 Pro on an Athlon system. I never thought much of the nVidia FX5000 generation. The AGP nVidia 6000s might be pretty good, I've never had one but I remember good reviews for the 6600GT.

In case you're interested, there's an old review, I think from xbitlabs, which measured the power consumption of video cards from that time period. It showed that the Radeon 9000 generation were the last of ATI that depend mainly on 5V and 3.3V power. Once you get into the "X" range they mainly use 12V. So if your power supply is already set then choose the card accordingly.
I don't know when the change to heavy 12V happened on the nVidia side.

Radeon 9700/9800 Pro
if you don't care about SM2.0 I feel that a 1800+ would be nice alongside a Geforce 4 Ti.

I have a Sempron 3000+ (socket A), 2 Gb DDR dual channel with a Gf6600 256 Mb. Nice combination, Far Cry works well @1280 with details almost maxed out. Even the buggy and unoptimized Gothic 3 runs smooth.

Mobo is a Gigabyte 7N400 Pro, nForce 2 Ultra, Dual BIOS, ATA RAID and SATA. One of the latest and greatest socket A boards.

I'm terribly partial to the GeForce4 Ti line. It was the first consumer video card that I saw at 600€ at launch, but it was an impressive piece of hardware during its entire lifetime. Given the inmense disappointment that the GeForce FX line was, many people (counting me among them) decided to stick with the GeForce4 Ti and skip the DirectX 9 hype (then, of course) or grab an excellent Radeon 9700 Pro. I had that very same CPU at the time, an Athlon XP Palomino 1800+. The GeForce4 Ti 4600 is cheap on eBay, I just bought one 15€ shipped last week.

What's your operating system? For Win 9x, then GeForce 6, if you're using XP then Radeon x850. In both cases I'm assuming your motherboard has an AGP slot.

This one will have Win XP running on it...

From my experience, the Radeon X850 are a shade faster than the GeForce cards, with that margin increasing over higher resolutions, but I prefered the later for SM 3.0 support.

Scylla wrote:

From my experience, the Radeon X850 are a shade faster than the GeForce cards, with that margin increasing over higher resolutions, but I prefered the later for SM 3.0 support.

GeForce 6 went a long way towards closing the DX9 performance gap that GeForce FX struggled under, but the Radeons also allow higher levels of AA to be selected with less of a performance hit than GeForce 6.

Wouldn't the higher-end GeForce 6800/Radeon X800 cards get bottlenecked by the XP 1800+ in the first place, though?

If we were talking XP 3200+, that might be a different story. But the 1800+? I have first-hand experience with that one, and paired with a Radeon 9600 XT (admittedly not the best of cards at the time; I was hoping for at least a Radeon 9700), it just struggled to run Unreal Tournament 2004 at the desired 60 FPS average, which is heavily CPU-bound. Battlefield 2 didn't fare much better.

Well, for those games, I would move up to the next generation machine I have...

For games made for an 1800+ or lower, would you say Radeon 9600 or Radeon 9800?

Thanks,!

9600 for low noise, lower power consumption if those are concerns but 9800XT if you want to squeeze out the last bit of performance. ATi did something really strange with the 9600, they gave up some performance to the previous low end 9500 cards, so they may even be good for what you want to do. If you can find a 9500 Non-Pro that unlocks without graphical glitches, that would be a good way to go. With the unlock and overclocking it performs just slightly below a non-pro 9700 with memory being the only real bottleneck. the memory chips aren't rated as fast as the 9700 memory chips so they hit the wall a lot sooner than the core.

A Radeon 9800 Pro/XT is the best fit for that system provided you are not playing some of the newer titles like Bioshock ect. Geforce 6 has the performance but under win9x things can get dicey if you don't install the drivers correctly. I suggest using XP for the os then you have plenty of choices for the graphics.

9800 Pro because they are cheap and easy to find plus they don't use much power. 6600GT agp if a 6800 is out of your price range but your cpu is going to hold it back. A GF6 really shines on a Pentium M or K8 era rig on up.

Thanks, I will grab the 9800 then.. I can find most of these cards for about 14 bucks at a store close to me open and in a bin..

They are all tested so that isnt an issue...will let you know how it goes!

What games are you going to play? Radeon has caveats. Poor for GL and < D3D7. If the hardware is all cheap might as well get a Geforce too.

Frankly I am surprised so many here push Radeon. Maybe it's mostly nostalgia factor like with Voodoo2.

swaaye wrote:

What games are you going to play? Radeon has caveats. Poor for GL and < D3D7. If the hardware is all cheap might as well get a Geforce too.

Frankly I am surprised so many here push Radeon. Maybe it's mostly nostalgia factor like with Voodoo2.

Or maybe it's because GeForce FX is so horrible with DX9 and both GeForce FX and GeForce 6 suffer heavily when you turn on any level of AA. I use a GeForce 6800 Ultra in one machine myself because it's the most powerful card you can get with a Win9x driver but under 2K or later I prefer x800/x850. 😁

It could also involve with hardware stability too (SmartGART). I've had Radeons work where Geforces couldn't.

sliderider wrote:

Or maybe it's because GeForce FX is so horrible with DX9 and both GeForce FX and GeForce 6 suffer heavily when you turn on any level of AA. I use a GeForce 6800 Ultra in one machine myself because it's the most powerful card you can get with a Win9x driver but under 2K or later I prefer x800/x850. 😁

GeForce 5900 and 6800 do not "suffer heavily" with "any level" of AA in D3D5-8 and older OpenGL games. That is nonsense. Their ability to run high AA in old games is the main draw.

The only advantage I can think of for X8x0 over 6800 is somewhat superior MSAA. But X800 has no support for supersampling which is a negative in some cases. There's no point in arguing about D3D9 because I don't see the appeal of playing those games on an old machine.

leileilol wrote:

It could also involve with hardware stability too (SmartGART). I've had Radeons work where Geforces couldn't.

I assume you mean something like old Slot A, Super 7 and VIA Slot 1 boards. I don't think one can count on anything but a 3dfx card to work reliably in those AGP slots.