PCI (not PCI'e') vid cards for SL?

Alright, don't set fire to me yet.

I've got a "real computer" to run SL on from home. However, at work I've got a 3.2 ghtz P4 with loads of ram and drive space, but horrible HORRIBLE graphics. (Not much need for 3d in Excel these days). The machine has no AGP, no PCIe, just plain ol' PCI slots.

I've convinced the powers that be that I need to run a second monitor. They buy the monitor, I supply the card to run it. So I figured, if I can find a PCI card on the cheap that will run SL I can use my downtime at work for something productive.

Long story short, does anyone know of an inexpensive PCI card that will run SL acceptably?

*burp*
www.pricewatch.com

not realy sure.

There is a PCI version of the Nvid GF 5200 128 mb, Its pretty cheep to.

The GeForce 5200, or if you want cheaper, try to find a PCI version of the 4200.

i have that pci version of the nvid gforce 128 lol. are pcis "bad" or something?? i keep getting that stupid pci notification when i try to play. but i just ignore it and keep pushin

Wow, that's a really old one. What kind of CPU do you have?

Basically, the difference between the different local buses is bandwidth. This refers to the amount of data that can be transferred between the video card and the CPU.

For example: (remember, higher numbers are better)
PCI: 133 megabytes per second (maximum)
AGP 1x: 266MB/sec
AGP 2x: 533MB/sec
AGP 4x: 1066MB/sec
AGP 8x: 2133MB/sec
PCI Express 1x: 250MB/sec
PCIe 2x: 500MB/sec
PCIe 4x: 1GB/sec
PCIe 8x 2GB/sec
PCIe 16x: 4GB/sec

So basically, a brand-new, high-end computer can transfer around 30 times as much data to the video card as yours can. (In practice, modern video cards and applications still don't take full advantage of bus speeds beyond around 2GB/sec, though future designs will.)

To answer your question, it's not that PCI is "bad", it's just that it's really old and outdated for running games and GPU-intensive applications.

SL is the only game I can think, offhand, where PCI versus AGP actually matters.

With almost all games, the levels and textures are carefully designed to fit within a particular memory size. (in the case of Doom3, it has several different size points it tries for.) The textures are sent to the card at the start of the level, and that's the only time you can really see any difference. If you have a 256-meg texture memory (unusual on a PCI card, but possible), it would take about 2 seconds to send the textures, versus about a tenth of a second for AGP8X. This isn't really perceptible when it only happens every few minutes.

SL, on the other hand, is constantly streaming new textures to the card. Because users make everything, they can (and often do!) exceed the amount of texture cache on ANY modern card. When that happens, the textures have to get swapped in and out from main RAM. This is about 1/16th as fast on PCI as on AGP 8X, and so you can really feel the difference.

The actual rendering/triangle rate is completely unaffected by the bus... the commands sent from the main processor comfortably fit over a PCI bus, and there's no particular speed advantage to being able to send them faster. The geometry of the level will be identical and render at the same speed, no matter what the bus rate is. But textures will really kill you on PCI.

Because of this, SL is probably the only game I can think of where PCIe will make any difference at all. For *every* other PC game, good old AGP is overkill... ancient PCI is actually just fine.

yea it says its bus type is PCI x0

128 mb. geforce fx 5200 but my comp is only a year old intel pent 4 2.40 1 gig mb ram ( a little under that thanks to spyware tho lol) lots of gbs of free space lol