What video card should I buy with £100?

[CaptainHaplo]

Driver support for ATI has gotten better over the last 6-12 months. I recall when the "Detonator" series of drivers for NVidia were the headaches and ATI drivers were the bomb. Its a cycle and right now both companies are doing well at driver support.

If you were in the US I would say check Newegg - they have some sweet EVGA boards (Like a 9600GT 512 for $85). You asked about manufacturer - yes it matters - but only to a point. The real issue is the quality - the boards are equal speed wise most of the time - its an issue of parts quality and long term life.

[Wreford-Brown]

Another one has come onto my radar:

Nvidia® Geforce 9800GT 1GB PCI-E Graphics Card
<LI class=moduleBulletText>Full Microsoft DirectX 10 Shader Model 4.0 support <LI class=moduleBulletText>Play the latest DX10 games and watch high definition movies on your PC <LI class=moduleBulletText>Features NVIDIA PhysX™ technology <LI class=moduleBulletText>1GB GDDR graphics memory <LI class=moduleBulletText>112 stream processors <LI class=moduleBulletText>256 bit memory bus <LI class=moduleBulletText>Built for Microsoft® Windows Vista
The question I have is - will it run with my Win XP SP3?

[longam]

With a Pentium 4 3.06 GHz I double check your video card slot to make sure its not AGP.

[Wreford-Brown]

Double checked - System info lists my current video card in PCI bus 1 and CCIP put a very useful photo in this thread:
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=143907

[CaptainHaplo]

yes the 9800 GT will work with XP
Here is a link to the driver - read the release notes. The previous rev added support for the 98xx series among other things.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_178.24_whql.html

[Wreford-Brown]

I currently have a PSIe port but may be looking to upgrade in the next 12 months or so.

The 9800GT is a PSIe 2.0 card. I'm happy to accept reduced performance from the graphics card in order to give me the ability to upgrade in the future, but will a PSIe 2.0 card work in a PSIe port?

[CaptainHaplo]

Yes PCIe 2.0 is backwards compatible with the older x16 port. And as I posted to Zackstar - another 9800 GT will be very cheap later if you build a box and go SLI! Great graphics and speed for chump change!