PCI-E card to pair with an 805D

[downer]

A friend of mine just bought Empire Total War, and has had problems getting it to run. He currently has a Radeon X600 card, and I believe an Intel 805D. Empire Total War will load, and he can change Audio/Video settings etc. However, he can't get the actual gameplay to load.

I had him download and install the latest drivers from ATI, and he also tried turning down the game settings to their bare minimum settings neither of which did any good. I tried google and came up with a few other people having similar issues with the X600. Even if he was to be able to successfully run Empire Total War, I'm thinking it would run poorly.

He has expressed interest in a new video card, and wants my input. He is not hardware savy, and this card is going into an HP brand system. Budget isn't a big concern, however I can't see him spending much on a video card when the rest of his system won't be able to push it to it's capacity.

His current LCD is somewhere around 1280 x 1024. I haven't checked his system over yet in person, so his PSU could be a concern.

I wondered if you guys could give some recommendations on what would match up decently with his system. Something like a 4830 maybe? Lower?

[henzo]

4830 would be good. You could try to get a 9600gt, that should be plenty for that res.

You can find alot of 8800GT cards for under $60 if you look hard enough. That would be good enough for him to build a system around later if he wanted to.