Can anyone help me choose a graphics card?

Question

I own a Sony Vaio PCV-RS300 series PC. It's about 3 or 4 years old. I want to upgrade the graphics card, but I'm not sure what I should get. The processor is an Intel Pentium 4.

Answer 1

It's very hard to give good advice unless you state what kind of applications and/or games you run on your PC.  Do you do any gaming? If so what games?  What is it that you notice right now that makes you want to upgrade?  Please edit your question and I'll give you some recommendations.  

You will need a 4X/8X AGP video card for your machine, but they vary greatly in price depending on what your goal is.  If you'd like to run newer games then it might not be worth it since AGP is sort of dying out to more modern PCI-Express type video cards which will not run in your machine.  Here is the list of all AGP video cards from Newegg.com which is a very reputable hardware reseller.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductLis...

Hope that helps

Update:

That helps.  Most any decent video card can run Sims2, so if that's the main game you want to play then you shouldn't have to spend too much.  You can check out a popular web site called tomshardware.com that publishes monthly reports on best graphics cards for the money.  Here is a link to their August report which will take you to the AGP card section.  They list several ATI Radeon cards, but after reading several reviews on Newegg.com from people that bought these cards it sounds like the drivers can be troublesome.  They even mention this in the article

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best...

So my recommendation is this.  If you are tech savvy enough to tackle the ATI driver quarkyness then you might get a little extra bang for your buck going with the cards mentioned in the article (Radeon HD 2600 PRO, Radeon HD 2600 XT, or Radeon HD 3850 512MB).  But instead I would recommend an Nvidia card like the  Geforce 7600GS for a good all around card that should be somewhat easier to load drivers for.  Here's the card on Newegg.com for $90.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...

One more thing.  Video game performance not only depends on your graphics hardware, but also how much system memory (aka RAM) you have.  I would recommend adding at least another 512MB of RAM to your system which I think will be pretty inexpensive and will help.  Go to the following link and select your system from the list (find your computer's actual model number first).  

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductCon...

First select "Desktop PC", then Sony and then "Vaio PCV-RS", and then select the exact model of your computer.  512MB should only be around $15-20 bucks.

Well that's it.  Hope this info helped.  If you really get into games then you'll find that you need a newer computer with a dual core processor and a PCI-Express graphics slot to be able to play the latest and greatest games, but obviously that comes with a price.  Many people just go for a game console instead.

Good luck,

Daniel