Buying a new video card

[cousinjoe2005]

Hey all! Thanks in advance for taking the time to read my post and respond to it.

I am looking to purchase a new video card and was wondering if I could get some advice. Here are my current system specs.

AMD Athlon XP 2600 + (Overclocked to 2.19 GHZ)
ASUS A7N8X-X Motherboard
512 MB RAM
120 GB HDD
128 MB PCI Nvidia GeForce FX5200

I am looking at the Radeon 9800 and have found one for $89. The only problem is that it is only a 128MB. My question being then, will this card run significantly better than my current card even though they are both 128MB. By the way, the new card is AGP, I don't know if that has a significant improvement in speed or not. Thanks.

[k2]

ram is only important if you play with the max textures, and even then .. i can only think of doom3 requiring alot of vidcard ram right now. look at pixel pipelines; it's the easiest way to decide if you'll get an increase in rendering speed. the 9800 has 8 pipelines while the fx5200 has 4.

so, automatically it'll be faster. i wouldn't recommend going past the 9800 since your going to be limiting a more powerful card based on the cpu.

i have a 9800 in my system at home, with the omega drivers i can play hl2 at 1280x1024 without issue and doom3 is pretty playable at 1024.

not the fastest card, but it's far from being slow.

[cousinjoe2005]

So, in your opinion, if I play HL2, Doom, etc. the $89 would be worth the increase in performance?

[k2]

probably, but it's hard to say. is it a retail ati card or a 3rd party? look into the overclockability of said model. atituner is handy to get extra juice out of it easily. upgrading the cooling on the card would probably be required.

[cousinjoe2005]

I'm not sure. It looks like a retail box. It says "ATI Radeon 9800 by Sapphire". Here's the link. http://www.z-buy.com/product.asp?item=VG-ATR98SE

[ECA]

then Sapphire made the card using the ATI chipset..
Does your mobo handle AGP 8X???