Ok, so what is the deciding factor of how fast a card runs?

What cards do you have in mind.

Those questions, although valid, can't be answer in a manner where you find out the right info.

Nowadays its difficult if not impossible to give you an answer that is a hard and fast rule for comparing clock/memory speeds or even 512mb vs 256mb of ram anymore. The BEST answer I can give you is that the way to tell is with real-world benchmarks.

Decide what games you play. RPG, FPS, strategy, etc.
Find reviews on the cards in your price range.
Depending on how the review scores compared over several sites weigh then you can make an educated decision for yourself which card suits you best.

This might not be a quick short answer that you'd like but the days of comparing clocks and such to determine which is best (even in the CPU world) is pretty much over. Good luck with the hunt.

As the above poster said, if you say which cards you're looking for along with a price range to hit the people on the boards can be of some help. Also what games do you currently play?

The amount of RAM on those X1600 PROs is irrelevant, they will perform almost identically.

Look to newegg for the X850 PROs. They should be about $130, will run circles around the X1600s, and are the most powerful sub-$150 AGP cards by FAR.

Awesome, thanks for the input guys.

Cleeve...you said take a look at the X850 PROs. I found this one...http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6814102606. Seems like a good card, however, after reading some of the customer reviews, people talk about unlocking the other 4 pipes, making the card much better.

Does anyone know what that means? Someone gave some info about something called Dolf's autoflashing cd to unlock the extra 4 pipes for better performance, and said you can just google "dolf r481" and find it. Any ideas?

Now, would there be any disadvantage to doing that if I can? I supposed it would get hotter, but I'm going to snag a fan for it anyway.

These days, the number of pixel processing units seems to be the king. Be on the lookout for PPUs or Pixel Pipelines data. A card with double the pipes can be as fast as a card with a normal amount of pipes but double the core clock.

Correct me if I'm wrong, Graphics Gurus.
-cm

Wouldn't get all that much hotter. Free performance.

But I wouldn't count on it working. Even if it doesn't work though, it's the fastest AGP card you can get under $150...

Alright. Thanks for all the great info guys. Gonna be getting a card in another week or so, I'll let you know how it worked out.

OIC.
Well, the geometry pipelines of DX10 will change everything.
-cm