Recommendations for a low-price video card please!

[sherif_shaaban]

Hi. I have an S3 Savage4 32MB display card on a P III 1100, 256 MB RAM computer. I want to get a new display card as I'm into 3D games, and the Savage card gives me very bad results e.g. with Warcraft III and FIFA 2003 . The problem is that my budget is limited and I've made a quick search for the display cards that are suitable - financially - for me. I found the following:

ATi Radeon 7000/Radeon VE 260 Egyptian Pounds
ATi Radeon 7500 450 E.Ps
NVidia GeForce4 MX 440 450 E.Ps
(A U.S. Dollar equals about 6 Egyptian Pounds)

I know that there are more powerful cards out there, but the prices of these three cards suit me fine.
I saw the Radeon 7000 on a friend's PC: FIFA 2003 looked ok, but I have the feeling that it's like an entry-level. So I was thinking about the Radeon 7500, but I don't know whether there's an increase in performance proportional to that of the price (approaching 2x the Radeon 7000). Unfortunately I don't know much about the GeForce4 MX 440, but some friends recommend it to me.
I read a thread here on CDRLabs
http://www.cdrlabs.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=11032
but the prices of the recommended cards are way out of my budget (1100 E.Ps+).
Which one of these would you recommend, and how would you sort them according to quality? Thanks a lot in advance [/url]

[CignaXI]

Check these links out, they may help you:

http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/20021218/index.html
http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/20030714/index.html

Between those 2 go with the geforce 4 mx, if you can and is in your budget range check for an ATI Radeon 8500 LE it is much better the the Gforce 4 MX and also cheap.

[sherif_shaaban]

Thank you very much for the links..they were very helpful. And your opinion is very welcome. I looked up the ATi website and found that the Radeon 8500 series have been discontinued, which made me worry about the future support if I was lucky to find one here. The benchmarks on Tom Hardware show - as you already mentioned - that the GeForce4 MX 440 is generally superior to the Radeon 7500, so I guess I will choose the GeForce card. Thanks a lot again for the help

[Bhairav]

sherif_shaaban:
Hi. The Radeon 8500 was discontinued, but re-introduced as the Radeon 9100. This is the same card, and is decidedly superior to both the GF4MX and Radeon 7500. You might want to look into it.

[Turkeyscore.com]

another to consider is the FX 5200, pretty low priced for the card you are getting.

[TheWizard]

RA-DE-ON RA-DE-ON RA-DE-ON!

I'm partial to the Radeon 8500.

[CignaXI]

I agree with both Turkeyscore.com and bhairavp. I didn't mentioned the FX 5200 or even the 5600 because that you were on a budget so didn't even bothered, still they have a good price/performace ratio.

Don't worry about the support, that card has been in the market for awhile and you can find pleanty of support online and it uses the unified catalyst drivers that get updated very often. Plus if you buy the card retail you'll have a full year warranty no matter if it is discontinued. And like bhairavp said 8500le = 9100 (note that it is le and not 8500). These cards OC well, I have a sapphire 250/230 running at 272/272.

[Turkeyscore.com]

check these out, http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduct.a ... rty&DEPA=1 they are pretty cheap and they have directx 9 support.
This store wont ship outside US though. but the pricing is pretty close to the radeon 9100 and 8500.

[sherif_shaaban]

Hi guys. Just wanted you to know that I got a PowerColor Radeon 9100 64 DDR from a local hardware company, and it works perfect for me. The price is not low (500 Egyptian Pounds) compared to the 7000 or 7500 128 DDR (250 and 425 EPs respectively), but I insisted on it because I want a good card after all. Thanks for the help guys

By the way, Tom's Hardware website is awesome

[TheWizard]

I'm glad things woked out, sherif. And yes, Tom's Hardware is a very useful site.

[sherif_shaaban]

Another question, guys: what exactly is anti-aliasing? and how can I configure it to get the best quality with games?

[TidusTheCoolest]

Another question, guys: what exactly is anti-aliasing? and how can I configure it to get the best quality with games?

Anti-aliasing is a feature to make your game's graphic look more sharp at the edges . It will increase the quality of your graphic at the cost of performance .