Yeah i pretty much have decided to go core 2 duo instead of an amd, but my latest problem is fitting a decent gaming video carnd into my new budget. i would prefer not downgrading anything else so anything around 45-75$ would work (or more if its reely necesary)

MY needs for this is simply for a better gaming experience with the newer games.

Currently i was thinking about getting this
eWiz.com Sapphire ATI Radeon X1600Pro 256MB DVI/VGA/TV-out PCI-Express Video Card (Lite Retail)

Could this video card suport high grafics in the newer computer games?

Hi. Don't go with that card--the x1600 cards are built on the same chipset as the x1300 cards, which sucked. The amount of RAM won't change anything. If you want to be able to play new games at high resolution with good detail, you'll need much more than a x1600, and you'll have to spend much more than $75.

Bang for the buck, I'd recommend getting the ATI Radeon x1950pro. It is built on the x1950 chipset--a very good chipset, and has 256mb GDDR3 rather than the standard 512 on the xtx version. It's a great card, and on my computer, it plays any game currently out with no problems at 1280x1024 with full detail. I think the only game it slightly lags on is Oblivion--but I don't play it, so I don't care about that. The x1950pro is available for about $180--probably cheaper on some sites, but don't pay more--it shouldn't be that expensive. I got mine for $200 a few months ago, and I think the price has gone down. Check out the following site for performance comparisons for graphics cards. Note that on Half Life 2, with full settings enabled at 1600x1200 resolution, the x1600pro only yields 14.4 frames per second as opposed to the x1950pro's 55 frames per second. Anything lower than 30 frames per second is considered unplayable. The two cards are compared and hilighted in blue:

VGA Charts | Tom's Hardware


The card you are looking at is quite old, and only uses DDR2 RAM--as opposed to GDDR4 which is out now. The x1950pro uses GDDR3, which is quite good. There is a big performance difference between DDR2 and GDDR3 or GDDR4 cards. Secondly, the card that you're looking at only has 12 pipelines to utilize for bandwidth--as opposed to 36 on the x1950pro--this allows for a higher memory bandwidth, and therefore better graphics performance.

I strongly advise against getting the x1600 card, or anything lower than an x1800. The x1600 series cards do not play new games at high resolution with high detail settings. The x1600 were quite disappointing to gamers, and people were very excited when the x1800 series came out and gave very good results. The x1900 series is great. Even go for an xt (or an xtx if you have a few hundred bucks burning a hole in your pocket...).

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AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ (@2.6 GHz)
2x1GB OCZ Spec. Ops. PC3200
ASRock Dual939-SATA2
Antec TruePower 550 watt PSU
80 GB Seagate Barracuda SATA 7200 rpm
300 GB Seagate Barracuda SATA 7200 rpm
120 GB Maxtor ATA/133 7200 rpm
ATI Radeon x1950 Pro