New Monitor – What Card?

I would appreciate some advice on a suitable graphics card. The more I research the more confused I become and having read this forum I feel I may get some sensible answers?

I have an old PC which will have to serve another year. The colour LCD monitor has failed and I have bought a Packard Bell Viseo 200WS 20” LCD with maximum resolution of 1600x900 at 60Hz and VGA connection. Currently I’m viewing it at the maximum available of 1024x768.

My only objective is to be able to use the full 16:9 screen as cheaply as possible, I do not need any gaming facilities and use the machine for work and internet. The system is:

Motherboard: QDI Advance 6E
Chipset: VIA Apollo PLE133 Chipset VT8601
PSU: 250W
RAM: 512 MB
Expansion Slots: PCI (not express) 32 bit 5V
Operating System: Windows XP Service Pack 2
BIOS: Version 1.65
DirectX Version: 9.0C (4.09.0000.0904)

The existing video card is a Trident Video Accelerator Blade 3D/Pro Media which would appear to be integrated into the motherboard, the VGA connection is vertical. The User’s Manual describes it as Onboard AGP supporting AGP4x and 2-8 Mbytes of frame memory.

I know it’s all old kit but any suggestions? Thanks.

You could try looking for a ATI X500 pci card on ebay or similar. Also the 9250, matrox g550 or an old nvidia quadro card. They should be able to do it. No guarantees though.

Hmm, here's one new option: NVIDIA FX5200 PCI

Or check on ebay for PCI graphics cards: search linky however remember that you'll need a card that supports your PCI slots (I think for 5v that means it has to be keyed at the back of the connector, but you can check easily by taking the side off your PC case and looking at the slots :D)

You can get a Geforce 6200 for £32 from Scan

Oops, my mistake. Saw AGP in your post and thought you wanted an AGP card.

Thank you everyone for taking time to give advice. I will research the suggestions and post the outcome in due course, maybe some while! Re the PCI slot, yes the +5V is the one with the alignment slot furtherest away, thank you for flagging that up, I hadn't really grasped the significance.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Code45

... the +5V is the one with the alignment slot furtherest away, thank you for flagging that up, I hadn't really grasped the significance.

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No worries. A lot of PCI cards are keyed for both (the FX5200 I linked to, for example ;) ), but it'd be pretty disastrous to spend money on a card only for it not to fit!

To round this off, after failing to win a few 9250's on ebay, I bought a Matrix Millenium II as the ad said it supported widescreen. However I could not get it to show anything above 1:33 and even tried Powerstrip, which I had read about. No joy there so got rid of that card and now have a new ATI Radeon 9250 256 MB card off ebay from Hong Kong, £26 delivered and no more expensive than some of the bids I saw, and that has given me a resolution of 1280x768 in a wide screen format. Thanks to all for your advice. I would still quite like to use the full 1600x900 available on my monitor, is there any way to achieve that?