Looking for a good PCI video card

I

IceWind91

Geek Trainee
I have a 2 year old Dell Dimension 3000, and lately I've been getting into PC gaming. The only problem is that my PC is bottom of the line, and doesn't have PCIe or AGP slots; only PCI. I've bought 2 games (Battlefield 2142 and Call of Duty 2) that won't even start on my PC, because of the integrated graphics. I was planning on getting a new PC to get a PCIe slot, a bigger HD, more RAM, and such all in one shot, but it seems getting a new PC for a reasonable price is a lot harder than I imagined.

So, I've decided to try to find a PCI video card. I've heard there's some really good ones that can run modern games. One thing that concerns me is that in BF2142's system requirements, it says you need a PCIe or AGP card. If I tried to run it with a PCI card, would it not work at all like before or would it just be lower performance? I'm pretty sure I CoD2 would run on a PCI card, though.

I may have found a potential card.
Newegg.com - 3D Fuzion 3DFR55256P GeForce FX 5500 256MB 128-bit DDR PCI Video Card - Retail
I'm not completely sure I should buy it, though. I don't want to waste my money on something that's not going to do me any good. Will this card run new games? If not, is there another PCI card that will?

Thanks!
 
although integrated gfx are usually crap, try entering the BIOS & make the amount of shared memory (RAM) and allocate as much as possible to gfx

have upgraded your RAM from the default on a Dimension of 256Mb or did you pay extra for more RAM ?

basically try upgrading your RAM & increasing the amount of shared memory assigned to gfx (in BIOS) before buying a gfx card

your cheapest option may be to replace your case & motherboard, because obviously a Dell upgraded motherboard will probably be expensive
 
I have 512mb of RAM, but my main problem is lack of Pixel Shader support. I don't have any kind of support for pixel shaders or vertex shaders whatsoever, which is why I think those 2 games don't even start. As for price; I really don't mind spending $60 on a card if it works the way I think it will, considering I was about to spend $1000 or more on a new PC.

Thanks anyway!

EDIT: I just saw a video of someone playing BF2 on this card, so it should work with BF2142. I'm going to buy this now.
 
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