So you only have PCI slots and want to game?

PCI is not an acceptable option nowadays, but when it was my old geforce 6600 was great. Played Half life 2 and CS:S and tons of games
 
I found this thread to be very useful. The most powerful PCI card I could find was Zotac's GeForce GS 610. They're about $60 on amazon and newegg, are still produced, and the bottleneck seems to be the PCI interface itself. If you want to play old games on an old PC, then this is the card you want. You're not going to find anything better.
 
Obviously you don't want PCI graphics if at all possible. On some legacy PCs, it is your only choice. It is a marginal improvement over onboard.
 
I don't know about marginal. It gave my computer a pretty significany speedup. I went from ~8000 on AquaMark3 to ~26,000. I can play HL2 on high settings instead of low, and I meet the minimum requirements for a few more modern games, although my primary interest is games from around '05, which the 610 I mentioned can easily handle. I ended up spending $100 in total on this rig so I could get into older 3D games, which I think is pretty good.

Of course, you're right about the PCI. If you have anything better than a PCI slot, you should use that instead.
 
It's marginal compared to a modern graphics card. More like a drop in the bucket. Like I said, it will work for legacy PCs with no graphics card slot. I got a nice boost from my 8500GT PCI card a while back like you but that was nothing compared to a modern PC.
 
Okay, didn't realize you were comparing them to modern graphics cards. In that case I wholeheartedly agree with you. The 610 I mentioned got a similar score on AM3 as onboard graphics on a laptop my dad has for work.
 
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