I am using my computer which has a INTEL 845GVSR mother board for 3 years and was sick of the integrated graphics card of 64mb which shared my RAM of 384mb.
As the my model of the board doesn’t have a PCI-E or AGP slot I had to go for a PCI bus version of the graphics card, after a 3 long months of survey on PCI VGA cards and their availability in india I opted for ATI RADEON 9250 VGA card this would make a great upgrade from conventional integrated graphics of the intel mother boards.
If any of you are looking for a graphics card to suite your old fashion PCI buses here are some recommendations, though there used to be a lot of PCI graphics card in the market, with the entry of AGP(accelerated graphics port)and PCI-E(PCIexpress) slots)the old fashioned PCI cards are hard to find and Rajeev_Vermacially in india, so here are some of them actually available in stores near you:
ATI RADEON 9250:
Register compatible with VGA
Supports VESA PnP compatible displays
BIOS compatible with VESA for super VGA
DDC1/2b/2b+ monitor support
VESA Display Power Management Support
Separate horizontal and vertical synchronization at TTL levels Features
Charisma Engine™ II Four parallel rendering pipelines process up to 1.1 billion pixels per second High performance 2nd generation hardware transform & lighting engine Advanced vertex shader support for the latest programmable effects
SmartShader™ technology Full support for DirectX ® 8.1 programmable pixel and vertex shaders in hardware 1.4 pixel shaders support up to 22 instructions and up to 6 textures per rendering pass 1.1 vertex shaders support vertex programs up to 128 instructions Complete feature set also supported in OpenGL ® via extensions Programmable shaders provide enhanced 3D effects in over 100 existing and upcoming game titles *SmoothVision™ Image quality enhancement features for Direct3D™ and OpenGL ® applications Programmable full-scene anti-aliasing supports 2 to 6 samples with user selectable performance and quality modes Advanced anisotropic filtering supports 2 to 16 samples for high quality texture rendering with minimal performance impact
VIDEO FEATURES
FullStream™ Hardware accelerated de-blocking of Internet video streams Video Immersion™ II delivers industry-leading DVD playback Integrated MPEG-2 decode including iDCT and motion compensation for top quality DVD with lowest CPU usage Unique Adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing feature combines the best elements of the "bob" and "add-field" (weave) techniques YUV to RGB color space conversion Back-end scaler delivers top quality playback 4-tap horizontal and vertical filtering Upscaling and downscaling Filtered display of images up to 1920 pixels wide Hardware mirroring for flipping video images in video conferencing systems Supports 8-bit alpha blending and video keying for effective overlay of video and graphics
DISPLAY FEATURES
Dual integrated display controllers to drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions and refresh rates Warranty 3-year limited warranty Monitor Resolution
800x600
640x480
1024x768
1280x1024
1600x1200
1920x1080* 16:9
1920x1440
1920x1200
Hydravision™ software provides complete control over multi-display configurations with a user-friendly interface 400MHz Dual integrated DACs with 10-bit per channel palette Integrated DVI-compliant 165MHz TMDS transmitter Integrated TV-Out support up to 1024x768 resolution it supports multi display configuraion which is a PLUS to the integrated graphics
NVIDIA GEFORCE FX5200
Features/Specifications:
Biostar EGate GeForce FX5200 128 MB DDR AGP Video Card
General Features: Powered by the nVidia GeForce FX5200 GPU 128 MB DDR memory 8x AGP interface 64-bit memory bus
2048 x 1536 @ 60 Hz maximum resolutions 400 MHz
RAMDACs 250 MHz engine clock 333 MHz memory clock
CineFX Shading Architecture CineFX engine Supports
DirectX 9.0c and OpenGL1.5 NVIDIA Digital Vibrance
Control 3.0 Blistering-fast antialiasing performance
nVidia Digital Vibrance Control 3.0 High performance,
High Precision 3D Rendering Engine High performance
2D Rendering Engine Display Pipeline with full nVidia nView capabilities API support
Connectors: Standard 15-pin VGA TV-out DVI In standard game benchmarks the performance of both the cards were almost the same, but the prices were not!!
ATI RADEON 9250 will cost around Rs 3500+VAT and NVIDIA GEFORCE FX5200 will cost around Rs 5300+VAT there are more PCI cards available(NVIDIA GEforce FX 400..)but are scarse in availability.
The NVIDIA version will be more easily available than the ATI version. WARNING:DON’T FORGET TO MENTION THE SHOPKEEPER THAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR "PCI version"AND NOT THER PCIE VERSION, THERE IS A LOT OF CONFUSION BETWEEN THE TWO VARIANTS... MAKE SURE YOU GO FOR ONLY THE PCI VERSION IF YOUR BOARD HAS ONLY A PCI BUS. you can mail me if anyone is not sure what sort of port is available on your mother board, just don’t forget to include your mother board model!