Graphics Cards Advice Please

[smokie10]

I have an ASUS A7V8X-MX Motherboard with on board Graphics and have been debating whether to buy a seperate Graphics Card but know very little about them.

Basically all I know is that Graphics cards now have there own built in Ram and therefore frees up some of the sytem Ram (or so I'm told). I don't play many games on my PC but do use MS Flight Simulator quite a bit.

Will having a seperate Graphics Card improve my monitor picture quality? Will it free up some of my system Ram? Are there any other benefits to having a seperate Graphics Card? Does anyone have any recommendations for a reasonably cheap Graphics Card?

Many thanks.

[Akumu]

A very basic graphics card will free up both system RAM and your CPU, the more expensive ones are capable of rendering complex 3D stuff but if you don't play the latest games then you won't see any benefit in spending more.

As for monitor picture quality, that's mainly down to the monitor rather than the graphics card, though if you're running games with a good graphics card you can turn all the graphics on and have anti-aliasing etc, so it looks nicer than with a basic card.

Have a look around the online stores, $40 or £50 will get you a basic card, which should boost performance a lot compared to onboard graphics.

[skattrd]

Cheap gfx card, you can get a refurb 9500 from retek or a s/hand ti4200 from ebay/forums for about £40 and it would make a huge improvement in any games and increase system performance as well as it frees up cpu and ram.

I can't reccomend seperate gfx enough - onboard gfx is generally poo.

[smokie10]

Found these 3 on eBay, All are brand new. Are any of them any good and worth buying?

ATI Radeon 9200 SE 128 MB Graphics Card+TV out Atlantis - £39.00

GeFORCE FX5200 AGP 8X 128Mb DDR + TV-OUT - £35.95

ATI RADEON 9200 128 MB DDR HIGH PERFORMANCE TV OUT - £31.95

Thanks

[Akumu]

I'm not sure which of those three would be fastest, as far as I know, the 9200 and FX5200 are roughly equal in perfomance... But you can't really go wrong with any of them, they'll all improve performance a lot compared to the onboard graphics.

[daniel_owen_uk]

The 9500 over at http://www.retekdirect.co.uk/acatalog/Video_Cards.html

Is very good value (especially if you get one that softmods).

Whilst you may not play games, I don't know if anyone that will use the pc might want to?

[ed^chigliak]

I think you would be amazed at the difference with a Radeon 9500 refurbished/second hand from http://www.retekdirect.co.uk/acatalog/Video_Cards.html

You only got 30 days to return the card from Retek if it's faulty but that's better than 2nd hand ebay IMO. Just stress the card as soon as you get it to test everything is OK. Playing a 3D game or two for several hours or leave 3dmark2003 running and if that works fine it'll be right.

LINKY
http://graphics.tomshardware.com/gra...charts-10.html

Looking at the graph you can see the Radeon 9500 is quite far up the rankings and offers pretty good performance for MS flight sim. 9200/FX5200 they'd be righ down the bottom so I would avoid them. You can see the Geforce 4 Ti4200/Ti4600 are also pretty good and 2nd hand should be £40ish if you can find one on ebay.