Best affordable AGP card for Bioshock

It should be fine. I wouldn't get anything faster than a 7600, because it will become severely bottlenecked by your aged CPU. Gameplay won't be awesome, but you should be able to get it to run decently at lower resolutions.

7600gt would be the best thing to buy imo.

I also agree with the 7600GT. The AMD card that is about the same in speed is the x1650XT, which I'm not sure ever came out on AGP. (If it did, its probably much more expensive.) There are plenty of x1600 and x1650pros that are on the AGP bus, but they are all slower then the 7600GT. And as was mentioned, due to the speed of your computer, I'm not sure that the x1950pro will be much faster then the 7600GT. (It will get faster the higher in res you go, but the difference between 15FPS vs 8FPS at 1920x1200 means you still can play the game.)

thanks for the reponses.

ok, to narrow it down.

differences except for clock speed on these 2?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

and any good safe places to get a used one besides ebay? (I did find 1)
there has to be some of these floating around used.

cheers!

Without having any prices, I can't say if its worth it. 512MBs of ram is nice to have, but I wouldn't go down a chipset inorder to get it. (I also wouldn't pay a bunch more.)

Get the one with DDR3 the 256, I just bought that for my little brother and it is pretty awesome. He specs area p4 3ghz, 1.5 and he runs all newer games on high on 1024x768. It was the xfx 256 7600gt 256mb ddr3. Good luck.

this looks like a good deal.

http://www.amazon.com/XFX-GeForce-7600GT-256MB-PCI-E/dp...

edit oops its pci-e

Oddly enough, the PVT73AUDE3 has the faster clocks then the PVT73AUDF3. Assuming that the E3 was made before the F3, I wonder why they put the clock speeds down some. Either there were some stability problems with the E3 and they had to put the speeds down, or they wanted a slower cheaper card out there. (that or F3 came before the E3.) Either way, I vote for the cheaper card. An extra 20MHz on the core, and 50MHz (100MHz effective) on the ram isn't going to amount to much. I'm sure you could save yourself the money and do that yourself with coolbits.

went ahead and pulled the trigger on the cheaper 7600GT(the F3 version) at newegg.
thanks for the quick responses on this.
will return for advice on building my new system in 6-10 months but after doing much better research.
just wanted to get this going since i already bought the game(doh!).
cheers

No problem, it should do what you want.

If you are planning on upgrading that soon, I'm not sure I would have bought that card. Thats ~$100 you now don't have for a new build. You might have been better off putting that game on the shelf and use it as the first game on your brand new machine. But I'm sure you'll be happy with the 7600GT.

good lord! I dont have the patience to stare at the Bioshock box for 6 days, much less 6 months!
It will likely be 10-12 mo unless too many killer games my new config. cant handle.

I loved System shock 2 and hope Bioshock is just as fun and full of creepy atmosphere.

thanks again guys!