Video Card Advice

I just got DOOM 3, Love it of course, and it's making me want to upgrade my Video card. I'm wondering if anyone has advice on a card that would help out this system:

AMD Athlon XP, 2166 Mhz 2700+ (Chip)
Soyo KT400 DRAGON Ultra Platinum Ed. (Motherboard)
(5 PCI, 1 AGP Pro)
1024 MB (DDR SDRAM)
Plenty of HD Space (over 200g)
Right now, I'm using a GeForce4 MX 420 (insert laughter here)

Surprisingly, Doom 3, is actually playable with this crummy of a card, but it is sometimes annoyingly choppy. I'm looking to hopefully spend under 300$, but I'd also just like to know what's compatible with this kind of a setup.

Thanks in advance for any replys.

What's compatible? Uhm...an AGP card. Of course, if you want a GeForce 6800 Ultra (which is over $300), you'll have to make sure your power supply is up to the task.

If you want something decent that's under $300, I'd recommend the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB, or maybe the nVidia GeForce 6800 128MB, though I'd be hesitant to buy a 128MB card if you're planning on keeping it for awhile. Also, the GeForce 6600 cards should become available here shortly, so watch out for those.

Also, you might not want to go for exteme high end right now. I've heard that even on a system like mine:

3200+ AthlonXP OCed @ 2310mhz
1024MB PC3200 w/heatspreaders @ 420mhz 6:3:3:2.5
Nforce 2 400 (insert abbrv. here, I forgot) chipset

The Geforce 6800 series cards don't perform as well as they should because the system gets bottlenecked on CPU/RAM speed. Seems the cards are a bit too powerful to run fullspeed on todays midrange hardware.

Well that's good, because if you buy one and It's performing as well as it can on your hardware, you know you'll get a bit of a boost when you next upgrade your CPU/RAM etc. If the card is running so well that the system is bottlenecking elsewhere, I can't see that as a bad thing at all.

But you really can't upgrade an XP3200+, can you? :)

Bloodshedder said:

What's compatible? Uhm...an AGP card. Of course, if you want a GeForce 6800 Ultra (which is over $300), you'll have to make sure your power supply is up to the task.

Tell me about it. Currently got a crumby 250w PSU - luckily i've got a friend working at a computer component trade counter with access to staff discount. Next week i should have a 350w PSU and a Geforce 6800 256mb for a bargain total price of £260. Hurrah for me.

I'd maybe wait till the 6600 comes out for AGP. read about it here:

http://tech-report.com/reviews/2004q3/geforce-6600gt/index.x?pg=1