Tuesday Zotac said it plans to release PCI and PCI Express x1 cards based on Nvidia's GeForce GT 520 GPU. For those with (really) old systems -- especially those still sporting an AGP slot -- this is an ideal way to beef up the graphics to DirectX 11 levels without having to shell out money for an all-new barebone system.
"Upgrading your graphics card is the easiest way to boost your system performance and gain new capabilities. The new Zotac GeForce GT 520 PCI and PCI Express x1 graphics cards shows that you can experience good graphics without upgrading the rest of your system," said Carsten Berger, marketing director, Zotac International.
Both cards will come packed with DVI, HDMI and VGA outputs with dual simultaneous independent display support for an instant dual-monitor upgrade. The cards will also be clocked at 810 MHz and feature 48 unified shaders, a shader clock of 1620 MHz, 512 MB of DDR3 memory, a memory clock of 1333 MHz and a 64-bit memory interface. They're also hardware accelerated Blu-ray ready and support Shader Model 5.0.
So far pricing and availability is unknown, but similar cards with 1 GB of DDR3 and a PCI Express 2.0 x16 interface cost around $57 to $60 USD on Newegg.