Looking for a video card...

[luke_slovakian]

For under a hundred....hmmmmm u might wanna just spend xtra 70 dollars max n buy the Radeon 9600xt w/ 256 for 210 otherwise for 150, and w/ new catalyst driver will last u for years. Great card u can run half life 2 maxed out on setting:-)

[boran_blok]

the thing is, sub $100 dollar video cards with 256 MB memory will never use more than 128 of it so it's useless to buy them.

atm the only game really needing over 128 Mb is doom3 at high detail levels, and not even a 9600 can run doom3 at high detail levels (where 256 MB of memory is usefull) so in short, getting a budget card with 256 MB of memory is not a good investment, you'd rather get a good card with less memory and better performance.

i'd really reccomend a Geforce 6200 AGP for about $ 76 (from pricewatch - shop www.newegg.com) or for a bit more the 6600 AGP for $ 130 (which is about twice as fast as the 6200) I think as far as money goes you cant get much better than that, the 6200 will play all current games at lowest settings, and yesteryears games quite decently, the 6600 will play all current games very well actually (to name a number: about 120 fps in UT2400 and a very playable 60 fps average in HL2)

IF you decide to get a 6200, make sure that you do not get a turbocache card, those use parts of your systems memory as their own (like integrated video cards on motherboards do) and are increddibly slow I reccomend checking out this comparison:

http://graphics.tomshardware.com/gra...524/index.html

I know it's about PCI express graphics cards but the AGP counterparts are in general no more than a few frames behind or ahead (nVidia uses an AGP to PCIe bridge which technically makes the AGP cards faster because there is no translation neceseary, ATI goes the other way around which technically makes the AGP counterparts slower than the PCIe but this is all on paper, if you decide on a card i'd suggest you try and find it's AGP benchmarks)

also dont expect the numbers as in that review, because all the other components in the test PC are top of the line, and considdering you're stretching for $100 i'd think your PC would not be so top of the line.

[deccan]

Anyone know a good website that has good reviews / comparisons of gaming oriented notebooks / mobile GPUs?

[boran_blok]

tomshardwareguide and anandtech, but they're almost always notebook reviews, since it's kind of hard if not impossible to just take a notebook and test it with various mobile GPU's.