A Good Video Gaming Card?

[finaltable]

I have recently return to the forum and with a new computer, well new to me.  I got a Dell Dimension 4700. The specs. are as followed.

Intel Pentium 4 CPU 2.80 GHz
4.0 GB/RAM 
XP Professional

I have a slot open for a PCI Express 1 X 16 video card.  I was wondering if anyone could suggest a good card for Sim City/Rush Hour.

I'm hoping to not spend to much, my preferred range is $60 to $150 but will to spend up to $250.  I will be hooking this tower up to a flat screen T.V. with a size from 32 inch to 47 inch, connecting via HDMI.   I think all cards now come with HDMI though anyways. 

Any suggestions would be great.

[finaltable]

Surly, I'm not the first person to ask this, or updated their own PCI express card.  I tried to do some research online, but turned up with nothing.

[jmyers2043]

Surly, I'm not the first person to ask this, or updated their own PCI express card.

You're probably right about that. But I can't help because I have an older computer and it has an AGP slot for the graphics card.

The original graphics card for my computer was an ATI 9700 ... it lasted 8 years (died in December). I made an emergency trip to Best Buy and bought another ATI card which, by the way, was the only one on the shelf for legacy computers. It lasted 5 months. The game played like crud. I later found that the drivers had some incompatibility with DirectX which stressed the card.

I now have a Nvidia GeForce 6200. It works great but that's probably not much help to you. 

Good Luck

- Jim

[jdenm8]

Same here TBH...
I'd say go with as old a PCI-E card as you can get your hands on new. The newer models seem to only have issues with SC4 (mainly related to SC4's hardware acceleration), though I've read nVidia's support has improved as of recent in that Hardware mode works at all.

I'd go with an GeForce 8 series or earlier, an 8700GS if you can get your hands on one. It was an epic card when it was new.

[finaltable]

Thanks for your replies.  Maybe someone out there has used a newer card and and hasn't seen this post yet. 

One problem is that I want to hook this computer up to a tv with HDMI and the newer cards have them.  I might end up just buying one and giving it a try.  I tried to search online for older cards with no luck.  Plus I don't know if I could still hook a tv up to it. 

I'll hold out a little bit and see if anyone else replies.

[Shark7]

I have an Nvidia GTS 250 on mine and can not run SC4 in hardware mode, it completely messes up (ironically, this only started after the latest update).  So if you go with a newer Nvidia card, you are probably stuck running in software mode, which does work fine.

So honestly, I'd avoid the Nvidia line if SC4 is the only game you are updating for.