Good AGP card for 4x slot

Tom's regularly publishes a list of the Best Gaming Graphics Cards. Here is January's list.

You need to determine what the total 12v amps is for your power supply. Then decide if you will upgrade your PSU or find a card that will work within your limits. If you can't figure out your total 12v amps, post your Vaio model number and any rating info you can find on the label on your power supply.

In fact, the PSU is 185w. I quite like the look of the X1950 XT but wonderng whether it's too much for my current system? I have the cash to upgrade any bits but was hoping to play games without getting new motherboard etc, etc. Any ideas?

Well your cpu will be your bottle neck. So your not going to get the best out of any graphics card you buy, also being in a 4x agp slot it will slow down even more.

So you might as well get a good AGP gpu. here are some of the best to get

Ati 2600 XT
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6814102718

Nvida 7600gs
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6814133176

Nvidia 7600gt
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6814130099

Remember that 8x is backwards compatible with 4x

And i dont know if the GS is better than the GT

I also dont know if you are going to be playing these games at a high resolution, but if you do these cards have enough ram to do so.

Remember that you also will not get an amazing frame rate like you should out of these cards. You should get like 2 gigs of ram if you can in that system. Things will run smoothly just dont expect Crysis to be playable on your pentium 4.

I had a pentium 4 1.6 and 133 sd ram. only could but 512mb in it. I upgraded to a 6600gt and the frames increased but couldnt go that high do to my cpu being so slow. You should get 60 frames per second on source games easily.

All these Crackers are wrong !
Get the most powerful agp card you can...
some game will be affected by your slower cpu but most will not as
most games are GPU bound not CPU bound.
Just have 2gig of ram and the more memory on the video card the better
as this will mean less agp bus usage.

My kids athlon xp2800 system has an agp 4x x850xt pe in it and it literally Smokes My nephews p4 2.6 with a 2600xt.

The 2400 and 2600 are weak and will only run most graphic intense games on lower res and settings.

Oh BTW that xp2800 amd w/x850xt runs crysis on Medium settings, 1024x768, with zero Lagg.

I would suggest the x1950 pro 512mb if you need it today or wait till the new radeon hd3850 AGP comes out in a few weeks for the ultimate and it will be less than $200.

Do not waiste your money on the xt2600 as you wont see much difference between this card and a 9800xt for 20 bucks on ebay.
Other than it has shader 3.0 so you can run bioshock on low settings.

Also note your power supply is weak, tooo weak, get a 600 watt or better with at least 36amps total 12volt rails.
You can use this power supply on your next build so dont skimp.
any PSU under 75.00 is junk.
I would reccommend the Kingwin Mach 1 for Price/Performance and its Modular and the coolest looking psu out there.
http://www.crazypc.com/products/7205.html
This thing is quiet.
I have the 1000watt in My asus quadfx 4x4 board.