Graphics card for old system

Hi,
I have a 4 year old system P4 2.4B, 1GB of ram (cheap DDR333), a problematic Asus P4S8X (Asus, you really screwed me on this one!) and a 350W Enermax power supply with 17A on 12V rail rating.

I wanted to play some newer games like Neverwinter nights 2, Quake 4, maybe even BF2 and was considering buying an AGP8x card.

What kind of frame rates do you think I could get with (modest/lowest settings):
Geforce 6200
Geforce 6600
Geforce 6800 Xtreme (the crippled 6800 one)
Geforce 7600 GTS (same price as the 6800).
I don't want to upgrade the power supply so some of the more expensieve cards may not be an option any more. But I read some comments about some users running 6800 on a 300 W supply.

Thanks for your opinions.

P.S. I'm not considering ATI cards like X850 because I can't find one in the local store. Also X1300 and X1600 seems to get beaten by similarly priced GeForce (and the higher clock rates probably need more power anyway).

Yes I read the guide recommending the X850 Pro. I live in Canada and this is the only x850 I can find:
tigerdirect 285 CAD. Which is way more than any of the other cards I mentioned.

But more importantly what kind of performance would you say I should expect if I buy one of these? Would the games be playable at lowest settings? At mid settings?

You could expect to play at medium settings at 1024X768 with the 6600 (if it's a 6600GT), or the 7600GTS. Stay away from the 6800XT's and 6200 series.

With your system, I dont think it makes sense to go much higher than a 6800xt. Yes, it's weaker than a 7600GT, but I often see it on sale around 100$ for the 256Mb version, and I think you'll be bottlenecked at your CPU with any kind of faster video card.

Cheers

p.s. I bought a 6800xt for my gf about 4 months back, to upgrade her 3Ghz Pentium 4. She has 1.5 G of ram and some no-name mobo.
She mainly plays older games like WoW and some other mmorpg, but those play very smoothly on her system - your specs are similar so I'd imagine at lower resolutions (1280*1024 or preferably 1024*768) you will get very decent frame rates from a 6800xt with the current generation of games. Just dont expect to rely on your current PC to last you very long before a complete upgrade is needed

The 7600s draw very little power. The fact that they dont need an additional PCI-E power connetor means their top consumption never exceeds 75W (provided by the PCI-E bus).

I was using a 7600GT for a few months, and used a friend's power meter to measure peak power draw. I never saw ANYTHING past 300W at the outlet, meaning that the actual power supplied to the system was more along the lines of 220-250W max. Since you have a brand name PSU, I think it'll be easily up to the task, considering that a 7600GS consumers less power than a GT.

Just one final warning : the 7600GS is NOT a ground-shatterer by far. I'm not even sure how it does relative to the 6800's. It's a much weaker performer than a 7600GT, so maybe it's a good idea for you to list your current video card, so people might suggest if it's a worthwhile upgrade?

I refer you to http://www.penstarsys.com/reviews/ [...] index.html
for a fairly well done comparison between the GT and the GS.
As you'll see, the GT trounces the GS by at least 50% in most games - when that's not the case, a CPU bottleneck is most likely the issue.

I have a 6600GT and played NWN2 for the first time last night. Naturally, all of the settings are on low. The game still lags. I want to go right so I move the right arrow key. About 1/2 second later it goes left. I want to go left so I move the left arrow key. About 1/2 second later it goes right.

WTF. Whoever made the decision to make the world revolve around you and not make your character move when wanting to move is the dumbest F**K ever.

I wouldn't get anything less than a 7600GT. The X850Pro is a more powerful card but only has SM2.0. You might want to wait until the X1950Pro AGP comes out supposedly later this month to see where the prices will fall.

purdueguy, oh no! That's what I was afraid of. Looks like I'll either have to buy a new system or forget about games.

I don't know, maybe a used card could be a good buy for you. Not wanting to promote anyone but sites like Ebay and the lot can get you a good deal till you decide it's time to change your systeme.

Isn't the 7600GTS a 7600GS with GDDR3 memory? If so, it's the one I'd get.

Did a quick search and found this on the 7600GTS.

http://www.motherboards.org/review [...] 665_1.html

Thx for the link. I've seen that eVGA on Newegg for quite a long time now. It may be reported to be a 7600GS, but it's clocked identical to a 7600GT. What's it's reason for existence?