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Need a decent performing, yet pretty cheap video card...

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Gregory_WE

Member
Joined
Jun 19, 2002
My sister needs a video card to play the Sims 2. She currently has a Radeon 7000 series 64MB card but it doesn't support T&L, so what video cards would you be able to find for cheap that would do a decent job? When I say cheap, I mean less than $50.

I've looked at Radeon 8500's (64MB tend to be pretty cheap), GF3 Ti200's, 64MB Ti4200's...
 
What's the difference between the various 8500's? There are LE's and stuff (which are obviously Lesser Edition or along the same lines).
 
Gregory_WE said:
What's the difference between the various 8500's? There are LE's and stuff (which are obviously Lesser Edition or along the same lines).

mostly ram and speed. a bba 8500le (le=lite edition) will usually be clocked at 250/250, a lot of them with bga ram (it was just a regular 8500 with lower clocks and sans the dvi port, though the solder points were still there). other manufactures use a slower speed ram, and while the core will clock the same as a bba, the ram will refuse to go too high. sapphire, for example, uses a slower ram (4ns? my bba has 3.6 bga hynix, so its gotta be slower than that) and clocks to 240/240 or so default, without much room for ocing the memory. good cards though still, my 8500le is still chugging along just fine at 275/275, played UT04 just fine with lower details/res. good card if you can find one (or a 9100, same thing, renamed).
 
I've got a 64Meg AGP Radeon 8500 in one of my machines (an Athlon 1Ghz, 768Meg RAM) and it works a treat. 2 monitor outputs and svideo output, and you can pick this card up for about 40 bucks these days. I've got it running alongside a 64Meg PCI Radeon 7500, also with two monitor outputs & composite output for 4 total monitors (gotta have that desktop space).
 
I just picked up a New TI4200 for $69 that I overclocked from 250/513 to 285/600.
That's way past TI4400 speeds.Better cooling should get me higher.
I vote TI4200.
 
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