[thechat] PC buying: graphics cards?

[Paul Cowan]

Hi all,

I'm currently looking at buying a home PC, nothing too extravagant, just a 
workhorse to get the job done. While I'm an "IT guy", it's been so long 
since I've bought a PC that I'm not really au fait with a lot of things, 
particularly graphics cards.

Motherboards and CPUs and memory I got myself up to speed on pretty 
quickly, but graphics cards leave me stumped.

Bear in mind that I'm not a big games player, but I would like something 
that will last me a few years in comfort. I don't play any FPS games or 
anything like that, but I might dabble in something like SimCity or 
whatever -- so I need something OK, but nothing that needs to pump out 
60fps of full motion polygon-city.

What I'd love is either:

a) A good site which explains simply and clearly the difference between the 
various chipsets that seem to be in most third-party cards -- the different 
nVidia/ATI chips that are everywhere now. I can't find much that seems very 
impartial.

or, even better:

b) one of you who knows exactly what you're talking about telling me 
whether I should go for a 9200se-based card, or a FX5200-based one: the few 
comparisons I've found suggest the 5200 might be a better bet, but I'd love 
someone with experience to tell me if that's what would be best (assuming 
roughly equivalent price), or if there's something else near that low-end 
price point I should be looking at. As far as individual manufacturers go, 
do any have a better reputation? Leadtek? Gigabyte? etc.

Thanks in advance, folks,

Paul