i am a serious gamer, and i want to upgrade my computer in time for christmas. So i wanted to know your opinion on which of the following graphics cards would be best for the job i want to do:
Sapphire Radeon X1300 256MB (PCI)
Sparkle GF 6600 512MB (PCI)
Gigabyte GF 6600 Turbo SLI 128MB (PCI)
Any other graphics cards within the price range of £0-£100
Also, does the memory of the card only effect the preformance, or is there other things that matter?

Thanks

If I were u I'll take the GF 7800XT compared to the Radeon X1300.

xboxrulz

After the top of the line X1000 series comes out it's going to mop the floor with nVidia thats what i would go for and once the perfect the crossfire there is no stopping it and yes memory does perfect it's overall preformence expecially for these cards since the have 8 pipelines where the 7800 has a mindblowing 24 but out of yoru list I would personally go for the X1300

When you say PCI, do you mean PCI-Express, or standard PCI? Really, though, if they're standard PCI - which I doubt in a 512MB - look for PCI-E.

Beyond that, I don't know too much. I'd just purchased a 128MB GF MX 4000 PCI [Yes, regular PCI. I'm a hypocrite, I know.] today, and beyond what I've seen on the internet, I don't know too much. Could somebody with a bit more experience - perhaps even with the same card - supply me with a bit of info?

PCI is a shared port. It shares the same bus as your network card, soundcard and what not, even your modem. AGP (Advance Graphics Port), the older dedicated port for graphics, it has it's own bus, and it's speed is MUCH better than PCI. PCI-E, the new dedicated port for graphics, built on top of the old PCI technology. The difference this time is that PCI-E is currently used only for graphic cards. It is around 5x-10x faster than AGP in the bandwidth. Therefore, having the ability to add better framerates and pixel fill-ins.

xboxrulz

so can you fit a PCI express card into an ordinary PCI slot?

Haha no web for most cards if you look the PCI-E it wont be longer then your thumb while some might be as long as the standerd AGP slot but no there are certians "cut-outs" in the card where plastic goes in this makes sure that you dont put it in backwards or put in a wrong type of card also PCI-E is servreal timesfaster then PCI which was the whole reason it was created first created was PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) was to create expandion slots so you can add cards and extra features on to your computer thats when most graphics company formed and almost removed the term intergrated graphics then AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) was formed it's main purpose was to suppy powereful graphical devices which removed the boundries and restrictions that had proven troublsome to the designers and programmers to the Graphics industry this was because teh demand of 3D became a huge cry people were getting sick of 4 colors after they wanted higher resolutions and more colors they got 16 colors and higher resolution and after 10's of years now we have big screen TV bloody projectors as monitors for computers with 256 colors! (Thats a lot more then a rainbow, if you can list 256 colors with out looking it up you deserve a medal) of course I left out A lot of history if you want to know the whole process look it up in google or a A+ book of I might write it out later, and now we have PCIE which can handel double the transfer rate of which an AGP can and also is much more flexiable (sorry if some parts run off or done make sense it's 3 in the morning) if you need more information I'm happy to supply it
James

.. what a long sentence.

In that case, is there any sort of PCI>AGP converter that can be obtained? In any case, how much'll the speed of the card be hindered if it's shared with, say, a wireless network card and a sound card?

haha sorry phrame when I'm posting I dont usually look out for punctuation, well um PCI>AGP Converter....I have not heard of such a thing but maybe someone else has I'm not to sure what your second question is please clerify

It's obvious that he was talking about pci-e, duh!

If I were you, I would take the ATI card. I prefer ATI, because NVidia is like Microsoft - owning a big part of the market, but not so good. Sure, their graphic cards are good, but the new ati cards will destroy nvidia. Also, I think that 512 MB is waaaaaaaaaaay unneccesary. A year ago, 128 MB was a standard and 256 MB weren't even 50% better than the 128MB ones. ow it's the same situation with 512 MB - you don't get any better performances.

On the other hand, the 128 MB NVidia card is quite good, but in my opinion, it's better to buy ATI nowadays... But don't listen only to me, I'm sure other people don't agree