Sapphire RADEON HD3850, (512 MB) AGP Video Card

I purchased this as an upgrade to my old computer which doesn't have PCI-E.  It's an old Abit AN-7 Nforce 2 board...nice board in it's prime...but rather wimpy by today's standards.  However, with the addition of this card and another Gig of PC3200 RAM, I was able to breathe some life into this old system.  I can now play L4D, BioShock, and Prey, all on hi-quality.    Of course, this didn't just happen with the installation of the card.  You must make sure ALL your drivers are up to date, including your motherboard drivers, in order to eek out the best performance. (Note: you  probably won't be able to play games like Crysis on hi-quality, but you should be able to play them.  I think this card is DX10 compatible, but I haven't seen DX10 for Win XP yet.) Also, it's recommended that you skip the install disk provided with the card and just go directly to Sapphire's website and download the recommended drivers for this card.  I downloaded the drivers in advance, then booted in Safe Mode, removed all previous ATI drivers, then ran Driver Cleaner, then rebooted again and installed the new drivers. 

The card itself is very good.  I ran Prey and L4D with GPU-Z open, and the GPU ran at only 30-40% of capacity during gameplay.  Unfortunately for me, my Athlon XP 3000 (even OC'd) is a bottleneck, running anywhere from 50-98% of capacity during these games depending on what's happening. 

The only knock on this card that I have is the noise on boot up.  This vid card sounds like a prop plane taking off for the first 2-3 minutes of operation after a cold boot.  It seems to need to find equilibrium (ball bearings?) before it quiets down.  After that, it's pretty quiet.  Lucky for me, I leave my machine on 24/7, so I don't have to listen to that godawful racket each day.