Fishface wrote:
Mr.E Solved! wrote:

What are his three preferred game titles?

I don't think he has played any real games yet!

Get the card that meets all other criteria and will run those games best.

Do not worry too much about "4x" or "16x" with a single card, the lower
bus speed 533/800MHz will hamper performance enough, but running
at low resolutions (1024x768) will avoid those performance issues, as
long as the card isn't one of those dreaded turbocache cards and
thereby impacted by the less available bandwidth headroom.

That board is a sled and it isn't suitable for high end gaming, say
Oblivion, but I bet it and a 7600GT can run BF2 and other FPS games
well enough.

To put the performance loss of "16x" to "4x" (at moderate resolutions
with correct hardware) to scale, it is greater than the performance loss
of going to CAS5 from CAS4 DDR2, but less than the performance
loss of going to a 533MHz from a 800MHz FSB. How much less varies.

I found a comparison of the AGP and PCI-E capabilities of the
ASRock 775Dual-VSTA. On this board also, the PCI-E is x4.
They say there is at most a 10% performance penalty incurred by
a high-end GPU on this board. I imagine that the Intel chipset board
would at least be no worse.
www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2814&p=4
www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2797&p=14



Yup yup, good link. You should now feel confident in recommending the
7600GS. It is a reasonable card for a person with no set gaming
preferences and a pokey mobo!