hey, Azn, whereve you been? well first of all, the connection type PCI-E > AGP > PCI secondly, the version of the card, and knowing from reviews/experience what is the best thirdly, pipelines are a must for high gamers. lastly, whether it has a DVI/VGA/TIVO/S-Video, and whether the VGA port is on the card, or on a cable connected to the board. thats my 2 cents..
in order of whats important interface: PCI-e, AGP, or PCI(performance isn't hugely affected, but PCI-e cards are cheaper and are slated to be the standard for the next few years whiel AGP is being phased out and PCI almost entirely gone) clock speed of core number of pipilines on core (clock speed*pipelines is a rough estimate of eprformance though give higher prefernce to clock speed, also note that 1mhz on an ATi card isn't the same as on a nvidia card, both excell in diferent enviroments, look at benchmarks) memory speed and latency(look for high speed memory ona card, gDDR3 prefered; DO NOT GET A CARD WHICH 'features' HYPER-CACHE OR TURBO MEMORY AS THEY SUCK) other than that everything doesn't matter too much. as long as you have 128mb of vram you're fine, youg et dimminishing returnss the more vram you have esp if you have a crappy core.
yeah and with that in mind, if you have a decent price range, you can get a ge-force 6200 (pretty good) open boxed at 30$, or go to best buy and spend up to 150$ on it lol, newegg gets them in stock every now and then open boxed like 27.99$ 12.99$ shipping
right now I'd say tha bang/$ cards are 6200 30$ - 9600 50-60$ - x800GTO 90-130$ 7600GS 120-150$ 7600GT 150-170$ - x1800XT 220-240$ overpriced but bang/$ in it's class 7950gx2 600-700 something $ a dash seperate big performance gaps
Core speeds Pipelines Memory and Memory Interface Price/performance Of course you'll have to know wether you want PCI, AGP2x, AGP 4x/8x or PCI-e 16x/. That's what I look at usually. Don't get fooled, a 512mb card is not automatically faster than a 128mb card. For instance, I saw a 512mb 6200 somewhere
