Hello everyone,

Please can someone advise me on what is a decent graphics card I can get for a budget of upto £60.

I dont really want to spend more than this, but will consider if a really good value card is available for say upto £20 more.

I dont really know much about graphics cards, but I know that the card needs to be AGP compatable, with a D-Sub Conection (saves me buying a new lead to conect my monitor, it does that new square connection type as well)

I'm a bit confussed looking on ebuyer etc, as I can see card within my budget ranging from 256mg to 1GB. Is it just a case of buying the one with the most memory?.

For your information, I wont be playing top games, just games that are a few years old, e.g. Age of empires, Farcry etc

Hi sometimesuk, welcome to itsallPC.

The main factor in graphics cards is their chipset (Radeon 3800, GeForce 8800 etc). Memory is only of secondary importance. For each chipset there is an optimal memory size - cheaper models have less memory, extravagant models have an unnecessary amount.

RTS are generally not very taxing for 3D graphics so pretty much any card on the market would do fine. Far Cry is still fairly taxing with all the settings at their highest and HDR turned on.

By far the best AGP graphics cards on the market today are the AMD Radeon 3600 and 3800-series cards; to the best of my knowledge there are no official AGP variants of Nvidia's current generation. A Radeon 3860 would be within your budget, and would perform reasonably well. A Radeon 3850 would be a little outside your budget, but is significantly faster than the 3860.

In your price bracket, there would be no reasonable reason to have more than 512 MB; 256 MB would probably do the trick.

syphus, Thanks for the reply.

After spending a couple of hours browsing today, I've totally confussed myself with all the different brands and model numbers. It doesnt really help when most of the reviews online are dated 2006 / 2007 for AGP cards.

I've managed to find a good site; tomshardware, where he lists the chipset architecture, so I plan on using that to help me decide on a suitable card.

Do you know / think that there is much difference between brand names, e.g. say a "dabs value" and a Sapphire or similar?. In other words, shall I just get the highest spec for the money, if there's not a lot in it, I'll go for a brand name.