AGP card? Need help please:

My nephew wants to be able to play oblivion, fear and the new battlefield game. He's using the familys old dell rental comp. It has a 2.8ghz p4 processor (478, obviously), 1gig 1066 rambus memory, and worst of all: that idiotic combined cpu/chassi cooling solution with just a chassi mounted 92mm fan and a plastic hood = ZERO airflow into the case.

It came with an ATI Radeon 9700pro card, which was the best of its days, and arguably the best dx8 card ever. However, it chokes completely on dx9 games in any resolution over 8x6.

As you can see there's no room for overclocking anything. 1: it's a dell. 2: it's already running extremely hot.

Now, i'm wondering: what AGP card should i get him? There is no budget, so don't worry about the pricetag, i just want advice here: How high can i go without the 2.8 P4 bottlenecking it = i waste money on something with no effect?

Oh and it's agp 4x, not that that matters a whole lot.

Please, i really want to get it for him this weekend.

i used to play oblivion on an x800xl with a amd2600xp(1.8ghz) i had to turn the graphics down but i ran it in 1280x1024 it wasnt the smoothest of game play but i dint want to turn the graphcs down any more. oblivions requires huge amounts of power to run at full details but you can adjust everything soo you acn fine the level for you. as for the bottle neck hmmm. i know that my cpu mentioned above bottle necked me in counter strike source. but dont know about oblivion.

The 9700 Pro is a great card, runs DX9 games at 1600x1200 smoothly!

Your problem is that Oblivion require graphics power beyond what even an otherwise great card can supply. My minimum recommedation would be a Radeon X1800XL...but that's not available in AGP. Perhaps a 7600GT could run it at 1024x768...but that would still seem a little slow. The 7800GS would be a good choice for performance, but its sooooo much money to dump into an old system.

No, all the AGP8x cards are designed to run AGP4x, in fact you could say that they're designed primarily to run AGP4x since their designed primarily for 1.5v signals.

BF2 requires only SM 2.0

For AGP, the best buy for the money right now is the $130 X850 PRO.

That will do an OK job in oblivion, much better than the 9700 PRO. But the 9700 PRO isn't that bad, even many expensive and new cards will choke at oblivion above 1024x768.

The X850 PRO should allow for 1024x768 at reduced detail though.