Getting a new video card

According to Intel, your board has a PCI-Express port, so for ~$100-120 I'd recommend a GeForce 7900GS or ATI Radeon X1950-ish card.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Don't listen to the above posts. The 8600GT is weaker than the 7900GS and similarly priced Radeon cards, especially in the older Source engine games. I myself have an 8600GT, I wouldn't wish it on anyone else in place of my recommendation, especially since the prices should be identical after rebates and such. Although the 8600GT can run CSS fine at 1440x900 at max settings and 16xCS anti-aliasing on my Vista computer with an Athlon 64 X2 4800+ and 2gb slow DDR2 RAM, you can get better performance with a 7900GS.

Also, forget about the X1650Pro, it's weaker than the 8600GT by far.

Also don't go for any card with 512mb of video RAM at this price range, because the card will not perform better by any significant amount. If you look at the old, now obsolete 8800 GTS 320 vs 640, even those former top-line cards don't have that great of a performance difference at mid to low resolutions.

Outdated but general guide for all this:
VGA Charts 2007 | Tom's Hardware

Also a benchmark for Orange Box, though lacking directly applicable charts for said cards:
AnandTech: UPDATED Half-Life 2: Episode 2 CPU and Graphics Performance



Edit: You ARE in the United States, correct? I see that Garret is from Canada, so these price ranges don't apply to him..

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Originally Posted by Garret

Firstly about the pricing, if you noticed, the link in his post to the 1650pro was from that of futureshop, which is a Canadian Electronics outlet store. His profile also reveals that he lives in Toronto, Ontario.

And his country flag is the American flag, not the Canadian flag, when you click on his user name. That wouldn't be my fault.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.