AGP graphics card recommendation?

Windburn

My girlfriend is interested in playing some (oldish) PC games with me, but her computer is 7 yrs old and not originally built for gaming. I'm trying to put a little life into it without spending a whole lot of money. I do have a few old graphics cards lying around, but they're all PCI-E and her motherboard only supports AGP and PCI.

Thus, my question: for those of you with good tech memories, what's reasonably decent AGP card that I can pick up on the cheap now (preferably <$50, used is ok)?

Thanks for your help.

.kbf?

What CPU is it running? I'm honestly not very familiar with the AGP bus but I'd be willing to bet that a newer ATI AGP card would be severely bottle necked by a 7 year old processor, especially one that was sub par for gaming even seven years ago. You're money might be better spent setting her up with a cheap core 2 duo and using one of the PCIe cards you have lying around.


For instance:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115032

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813185107

$164.98

versus

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814161225

$159.99

You're spending approximately the same dollar amount but the first, even with a shitty PCIe card will WAY out preform the second. I'm sure this will scale pretty well to the lower(or higher) price points.

Monkey Ball Warrior

Uh. This X1650 is fairly decent, but not really 1680x1050 bioshock good (which is why I plan on upgrading to a 9600gt in a few weeks). It was something like $80, a year ago. This card is better, and cheaper, now.

Stormwatcher

I have nothing but great things to say about the Geforce 7800GS.

Voro

Last I heard, the X1950 was the best cost/performance agp card. I was considering that for a year or so, but I've chosen to go the more expensive route of ditching agp for pci-e. Hmm, Newegg doesn't seem to have the agp models and it would definitely be more than $50, but it depends if you want the computer to run recent games or if it's just going to be a WoW/email machine.

Dark Shroud

Go with ATI, you'll get good performance at a reasonable price. You can find HD2600s below $100 at Tigerdirect.com.

I would recommend a card with 512mb of memory if the PCs CPU is old. That way the card's processor can use the faster memory on the card and not have to deal with the system bus, memory, & old CPU.

Daemonion

Get a proper power supply, make sure you've got at least a 2.0ghz single core (2.4ghz preferred), and for the love of god,

get a 1950 Pro.