IBM P4 motherboard AND Graphic cards?

[gudkov]

Hi, I have an IBM P4 mother board (http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/cpu/intel/pentium4/1.8G/850pro2_sm.jpg) with 3 PCI slots and 1 AGP connector slot

I also have a 23" Acer HDMI widescreen monitor (http://reviews.cnet.com/lcd-monitors/acer-h233h/4505-3174_7-33529135.html))

I would like to purchase a new graphic card for my computer to improve the quality of the graphics with my new monitor.

I currently have the NVidia GeForce FX5200 8X 128 MB DDR TV/DVI graphic card (http://image.made-in-china.com/2f0j00gBdTZHhMnQum/Graphic-Card-NVIDIA-Geforce-FX5200-16P.jpg)

I have made some research and i have found lots of different Video cards:
PCI Express 2.0
PCI Express
AGP
PCI
SLI

I would like to figure out which graphic card type is compatible with both my motherboard and monitor.

Please and Thank you,
Oleg

 

[CardboardSword]

If the most recent slot you have is an AGP, then your are quite limited in your choices. Ideally you'd want a PCI-E slot, however as that's not the case, I think the best AGP card available is the 4670. I'm saying this on what is more or less an educated guess, so someone may be able to provide a better solution. It will support DVI which will be fine for your monitor, assuming it has a DVI cord and/or adapter. Just make sure your power supply has enough juice to power it. Its not a particularly power hungry card, but I've seen some incredibly sad PSU's in some OEM machines.

 

[CrayonMuncher]

the hd 4670 is the most recent but from what i remember reading it is outperformed byt the hd 3870 however either of these cards will be bottlenecked by the pentium 4 and will probably require an upgrade of you power supply to work
what do you intend to do with your computer? you obviously want hd how about gaming or anything else
what is your budget?
your computer is only compatible with agp.
pci express is the next generation and sli is using two nvidia cards at once and is not relevent to your question

 

[87dtna]

the hd 4670 is the most recent but from what i remember reading it is outperformed byt the hd 3870 however either of these cards will be bottlenecked by the pentium 4 and will probably require an upgrade of you power supply to work
what do you intend to do with your computer? you obviously want hd how about gaming or anything else
what is your budget?
your computer is only compatible with agp.
pci express is the next generation and sli is using two nvidia cards at once and is not relevent to your question

Spot on there. Even if you get a half decent graphics card like a 4670, the CPU will NOT be able to play modern games that a 4670 can handle at all because the CPU is a massive bottleneck.

Let me put it this way, I've tried to play games with a P4, it just doesn't work. With a socket 775 board, a Cedar mill 65nm P4 (the strongest line of P4's there is with hyper threading and 2mb cache) overclocked to 4.5 ghz (not a typo) and a game that I get over 100 FPS with an E7200 I was getting about 15-30 FPS which is pretty much not playable.

Skip the AGP video card, and build a whole new system with a PCI-e graphics card. I can show you a $350-400 computer build that would play most modern games at decent settings. A 4670 AGP card is well over a hundred bucks, and you won't be able to do anything with it anyway.

Edit-If you were interested to know, this is the strongest AGP card you can get pretty much-

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814161284

And as others said, you'd probably need to upgrade your power supply as well because it requires atleast 400w power supply. So there's more $$$!!!

So basically you could spend $175-200 polishing a turd, or you could just fork out the $400 to build a sweet new setup.