PCI EXPRESS 2.0 GEFORCE 9600GT 512M DDR3 ENGINE CLOCK 650 MHZ MEMORY CLOCK 1 EN9600GT/HTDI/512M

Price : $129.99

This card greatly improved HDTV playback for me, (I dont use it for gaming so cant answer for that). Here are some notes on how I decided the upgrade would help before parting with $$$, and how I managed to install the drivers. My machine is an old Pentium 4 ((2.5GB ram)) on which I installed Vista and an HDTV (ATSC) tuner. That left me with choppy playback on HD content, and wondering if a video card upgrade would help or whether some other issue was holding me back. The windows experience index feature of Vista helped me decide. Click the start menu and then right click on computer (or Control Panel System and Maintenance System); this gives you basic information about your computer. In the system section theres a rating and a windows experience index link. Click on the link and you will see a breakdown of the score for different components (you may have to click to update your score). My graphics score was 2.2 with other components all around 5 (higher = better). This confirmed that video performance was holding me back. If your graphics scores are higher, or you have other low-rated systems, the video upgrade may not be so helpful. Installing drivers was very difficult. Whether using the packaged drivers or the updated versions on the Asus website, they would not install. In the end, I managed to get them to install by disabling anti-virus and turning off User Account Control (Control Panel User Accounts and Family Safety User Accounts). Just dont forget to turn them back on when you are done.

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