Need Recommendations for Graphic Cards

[hobo_man]

I'm looking to buy a decent graphics card and not some high end one. (While playing Guild Wars, I get BSoD with the error 0x0000008E which I googled and basically gave me results saying my graphics card was "insufficient")

There seem to be many choices, and I want to make sure I buy something that will function with my PC in its current state. Through browsing the nVIDIA site, I didn't see any system specs required for using the graphics card (Some say they are built for Vista... but I don't know if they will work on XP). I also do not know anything whatsoever about graphics cards, except they make visuals look better.
I believe I'm looking for a PCI-Express graphics card (whatever that is). My OS is Windows XP Pro SP2 and I have a Intel Pentium 4, 3.00GHz processor.

If anyone could provide some recommendations, it would be appreciated.
Thanks.

 

[b1gapl]

What is your budget, resolution of your monitor that you'll be playing games on, and the rest of your specs? If this is a pre-built computer, theres a chance that you might have to upgrade the power supply as well.

 

[heffer]

buy the Geforce 8600GTS 512MB, it's pretty popular and I think it's a good card for you.

 

[ricanflow]

buy the Geforce 8600GTS 512MB, it's pretty popular and I think it's a good card for you.

The 8600 GTS 512 is crap, when you can get an 8800gs for the same price.

 

[Trotter]

The 8800GTS and the 9600GT are around the same price, and the 9600 outperforms the 8800.

We really need to know the wattage of your PSU, though, as most GFX cards require minimum power levels. Just as b1gapl said, you may need a PSU upgrade to go along with a new GFX card.

 

[Jorsoft]

Are you using a prebuilt PC (HP, Gateway, etc.)? If so just post yer model number and we can look up all the info we'd need on it.