Can anyone recommend any good PCI graphics cards?

edited April 2012 in Hardware
So, a while ago someone gave me an old Dell Dimension 3100 for free, I was hoping that I could use it to play games from 2000 -2005 on, as it has a pentium 4 3.0 Ghz and windows xp home edition. The only problem that i have, is that the motherboard doesn't have any dedicated graphics card slots, E.G it doesn't have a PCI-E x16 slot or an AGP slot. Hence, i was wondering if any of you know of any good pci only graphics cards that would be able to play games like soldier of fortune 2, no one lives forever 2, and the original max payne. Two of these games suffer from audio problems when played on operating systems newer than xp, so this is my only option unfortunately.

Also worth noting is that the system does have one PCI-E x1 slot.

Comments

  • I found two Matrox G450 PCI cards, which seem that they would be quite nice. They're PCI bus, they have 128MB of some sort of RAM (each), and each supports up to 4 independent monitors.

    The problem is they use two LFH60 connectors each, which are used to split into two DVI/VGA cables. I, unfortunately, don't have the adapters and the shipping cost of the cables would outvalue both cards themselves, I'd be willing to bet.

    And besides, I realized those are like TNT2 equivalent, so they'd probably suck, never mind. You might be able to find a PCI/E x1 graphics card... I don't know.
  • yeah, you could totally use the PCI/E x1 slot for a graphics card, sort of like this one on Newegg.

    It's like $65 though. Just saying that there are fairly decent cards for PCI/E x1 buses. Maybe try eBay...
  • GDEA73 wrote:
    yeah, you could totally use the PCI/E x1 slot for a graphics card, sort of like this one on Newegg.

    It's like $65 though. Just saying that there are fairly decent cards for PCI/E x1 buses. Maybe try eBay...

    What he said. Otherwise, I think the newest cards to be released in PCI variants were the low-end Nvidia 8000 series and Radeon X1000 series. http://ncix.com/products/?sku=62668
  • could try this web site http://www.tmart.com/ they have a lot of computer stuff cheap.
  • Duff wrote:
    GDEA73 wrote:
    yeah, you could totally use the PCI/E x1 slot for a graphics card, sort of like this one on Newegg.

    It's like $65 though. Just saying that there are fairly decent cards for PCI/E x1 buses. Maybe try eBay...

    What he said. Otherwise, I think the newest cards to be released in PCI variants were the low-end Nvidia 8000 series and Radeon X1000 series. http://ncix.com/products/?sku=62668

    Actually, Duff, they have Geforce GT220s and 520s that work on PCI.

    But it won't be useful. The PCI bus won't have anywhere NEAR enough bandwidth for those cards. Just get a PCI-e 1x card, and a slower one at that. PCI-e x1, afaik is about the same speed as AGP 8x.
  • I know if you go to tmart.com they have pci and agp video cards. i think the cheapest video card is 19.00. they do have newer video cards to like pci-e.
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