You can get a 9600 GT for $169 before rebate ($149 after).

If you need to go cheaper, the 8600 GT runs around $80-90.

You don't need a lot of hardware to run TF2, and even less for Civ 4. The 9600 GT is a bit of overkill for those games, but the performance is SO far ahead of the card's price that it's hard not to recommend it. The 9600 GT is only slightly slower than the 8800 GT I spent $259 on at Christmastime (and we thought the 8800 GT at ~$250 was a jaw-dropping price/performance deal at the time!). It's been completely unexpected (and a little sickening! But exciting) how sharply prices have dropped, and how the 9600 GT came out and undercut the midrange further. There's never been a better time to buy a midrange video card.

If you can at all justify it, get the 9600 GT. NVIDIA is being insanely aggressive with their midrange cards. This time last year, you had to pay $300 for a decent midrange card. Now it's half that, and for a card that's better relative to its peers.

Yeah, the AGP->PCIe upgrade is pretty painful. You have to do motherboard, CPU, RAM, and video card all at once, and possibly hard drive, as most modern motherboards need SATA. (They have one PATA port, but that's used for your DVD drive.)

That said, however, you can buy a cheap CPU and overclock it, and get amazing performance for surprisingly little. $700 will absolutely get you into a shiny new system, and you might be able to get away as low as $400, depending on your power supply and how many and what type of drives you have.

The bad news, as you figured, is that you need PCI Express for today's video cards.

The good news, as boogle hinted at, is that building a game-worthy PC on a shoestring budget is incredibly easy right now.

*Legion*'s Cheapo Screamo:
CPU: Intel Pentium Dual Core E2180: $80
MB: Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L: $90
RAM: 2GB DDR2 800: $40
Video: eVGA GeForce 9600 GT: $170 ($150 after rebate)

For $380, we've got all the guts to a pretty kick-ass cheapo system, with $20 coming back in the mail. The Pentium Dual Core chips are the same cores as the Core 2 Duos, just with slightly less cache memory onboard. They're extremely good for the money, and plenty powerful for games.

TF2 is nothing to this system. This will play Crysis. Not as well as an 8800 GT powered rig does, but at a reasonable resolution and medium settings, it'll run Crysis quite well.

Nice - thanks for the advice Legion (didn't mean to hijack the thread DS). Once we get done with the last items in our year-long remodeling project I'll see if I can talk the wife into releasing a bit 'o funds for a PC build. Sounds like your spec for a cheapo system could do me well.

If you're plopping a new card in an old/non gaming system, don't forget to research power requirements. I can't speak to the 9600s, but I while ago I was thinking about replacing my 6600GT with an 8600/8800GT until I realized I needed a new power supply just because of the video card.

That should be fine as long as you don't go crazy with hardware mods and such.

How about if I'm running an Athlon 64 4000 cpu? I currently have a 7600 GT running (on PCI-E), and get decent performance on a lot of games. My most-needed upgrade first is RAM (I'm running 1GB, want to upgrade to 2GB). Would I get more of a gaming boost from taking the risk instead (this is a Gateway out-of-the-box chassis that I picked up as an emergency replacement for my primary system two years ago this June) of overhauling the mobo/cpu/ram all in one go (I really don't know what kind of problems I'd run into) for more cost, or boost the ram and upgrade the video card to an 8600 or 9600 instead?

You can take a 650MHz one and bump it up to 700MHz yourself with RivaTuner.

I operate on some tight computer hardware budgets, so I try to master the art of the low cost PC.

As long as you're capable of sticking some parts into a box, it's easy to seriously close the PC/console price gap.

If you do get it up and running, let us know how it goes. I need to put Linux back on my desktop PC, may have to give it a shot myself.

Ooohh, ooohh, do me next!

I've got Althon 64 3000 CPU with 1.5 GB RAM, 350 W PSU, and a 6600 GT. It's hooked up to a heavenly Dell 24" Monitor 1920 x 1200.

My question is: What (if any) sane video card upgrade is there for this box considering I don't want to replace the PSU or CPU? I don't have an delusions of playing Crysis on it, but I wouldn't mind running WoW, TF2, or an RTS at native res with a good (~30 fps) framerate.

You would need at least a GeForce 9600 (around $150 if you can get a rebate). If you've just got WoW, TF2 and some of the other less demanding apps, you could probably get that to work at 1900x1200. Perhaps not at high settings. I would be concerned about your PSU. Some more RAM may also help, but thats real cheap.

Go here and see if you can make the PSU work: http://www.extreme.outervision.com/psucalculatorlite.jsp

How does it work now with your 6600 GT?

I am currently have an 8600 GT and playing TF2 under wine. I use 2 versions of wine, 1 is the stock Ubuntu wine version which plays my Steam games. The other one is nightly build from winehq that allows me to play Eve-Online with premium graphics.

Before that, I had a 7600 GT but the fan failed and it pretty much melted.

EDIT: I'm driving 2 monitors, 1 is a 1680x1050 and a 1280x1024. The 7600 was able to drive them fine with a game playing on the larger screen with low settings. However, it really strained the system. The 8600 GT handles it so much better.

Only you can decide if it is worth the money. It all depends on what games you want to play, what resolution you want to push and what level of detail is acceptable to you. Unless you spell that out in detail, nobody here can answer that question.

The true value card today is the 8600GT, which can be had for $60 after rebate and will play most modern games at good detail and resolution. If you want better graphics, the 9600 is a good value at $160ish. If you require even better graphics, you will need at least the 8800, which at around $200 is also a good value.