What video card do you reccomend

[machbrown4]

I'm not much of a gamer however I do play Sims 2. I need an upgraded video card. What do you all recommend? I currently have on board video with 64mb shared memory & it is just not cutting it. Thanks!

 

[gurusan]

Which motherboard? Does it have an AGP or PCI-Express slot? What's your budget? Is Sims 2 the only game you play?

What's the rest of your setup (cpu, ram, etc)?

 

[Snake91839]

He is right, it really depends on if you have AGP or PCI-E.

There also might be some other things you can also do to improve performance, I would upgrade to 1GB of ram if you do not already have it.

Good PCIe card, and extremely low price for the performance you get:
Newegg.com - EVGA 256-P2-N624-AR GeForce 7900GS 256MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 KO Video Card - Retail

AGP is bound to be more expensive because it is going towards the direction of being obsolete. However, this card should give you good performance:
Newegg.com - EVGA 256-A8-N542-T2 GeForce 7600GS 256MB 128-bit GDDR2 AGP 4X/8X Video Card - Retail

If all you have is PCI, your performance will be low no matter what and I would strongly recommend a new computer with up to date graphics interface, however if you want to stick with PCI, I would go with :
Newegg.com - JATON VIDEO-338PCI-DVI GeForce 6200 256MB 128-bit DDR PCI Video Card with L-P Bracket - Retail

Of course, there are many other options, those are just the few that I recommend, there are other lower budget options as well, but those top two cards will allow you to play a wide variety of games beyond Sims 2.

Good luck

 

[machbrown4]

Which motherboard? Does it have an AGP or PCI-Express slot? What's your budget? Is Sims 2 the only game you play?

What's the rest of your setup (cpu, ram, etc)?

I'm sorry I should've included all of that in my original post.

I have a Mach Speed Matrix socket 478 which does have an AGP 8x
Intel Celeron D 2.93Ghz
Crucial 1GB DDR 400

I really don't have a budget. Of course I'm looking for a decent price.
I only play Sims 2 & my son plays Silent Hill.

I really appreciate it.

 

[dhgunit]

I would try a 7600GT or 7600GS.

The GT is about $150 and the GS is about $110.

 

[b1gapl]

You can get the GT for about $90-100 now.

edit: Oh...nevermind...you meant AGP. I forgot AGPs are a little more.

 

[dhgunit]

Yeah, if its PCI-E.

I don't know anywhere you can get a 7600GT APG for that kind of money.

 

[machbrown4]

You can get the GT for about $90-100 now.

edit: Oh...nevermind...you meant AGP. I forgot AGPs are a little more.

Thank you very much!

 

[gurusan]

Yeah a 7600GS should do the job just fine....also another 1gb of memory will help a LOT.

 

[Apokalipse]

Yeah a 7600GS should do the job just fine....also another 1gb of memory will help a LOT.

1GB will be fine for Sims 2. Just have paging file set to 1GB (1024MB) min and max.