I am planning to buy a new graphics card (for lite gaming) and I need to find out what kind of video card my motherboard supports/computer can handle... what should I buy. Using Belarc advisor my specs are as follows:

SONY VAIO RZ32G
Windows XP
Board: ASUSTek Computer Inc. P4SD-VX
Bus Clock: 200 megahertz

NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 440 with AGP8X (Sony) [Display adapter]
Default Monitor

74.64 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity
61.92 Gigabytes Hard Drive Free Space

2.60 gigahertz Intel Pentium 4
8 kilobyte primary memory cache
512 kilobyte secondary memory cache

What kind of graphics card should I get to be able to play games like City life or Sims 3 Sims Civilizations? Radeon ATI 9600? NvidiaGE Force xxx? Should I stick to NVidia since the computer came with that brand?

Doesn't matter what card you get. More about the price your willing to spend. The more you spend the better it will look.

Unfortunately you won't find much because mose video cards now use a different interface then what you have on your computer. You need to find an AGP card I don't think you will see a difference. I would look more into upgading your memory. Looks like your machine only comes with 512mb at most. I would up that to at least 1gig if not 2gig.

When I was still buying AGP cards I think Radeons had the better performance.

Thanks for your answer I marked it helpful. (yeah, I know, 3 years later... ) As far as the memory, maybe I could just fill in the empy slots to take it to 1GB
Slot 'DIMM0' has 256 MB
Slot 'DIMM1' is Empty
Slot 'DIMM2' has 256 MB
Slot 'DIMM3' is Empty

But won't I still need a new graphics card that has T& L and possibloy 3-D?

Well... since the last time we spoke in 2009... :-) Yea... I would say get a new graphics card as well.

Unfortunately a lot has changed in the last 3 years. Most of the connections in your PC (or BUS slots) have changed. You still need to get up to 1gig minimum suggested 2gig of memory. Your video card only accepts AGP slot cards and most newer cards are coming as PCI-E.

No matter which video card you choose you will be happy. I personally perfer NVidia card. I just bought an Nvidia GTX560Ti card for about $150, but like I said... I don't know if they make this card in the AGP which is what you need to look for.


Looking at the big picture... the newest card I can find on Newegg.com that would fit in your card is an Nvidia 6000 series video card. This is almost 8 generations of video cards behind what is coming out now. You had 6000-9000 series cards then the GTX 100 -500 series cards. They are just now releasing the GTX690 cards so its easy to say the 700 series cards will be out end of this year. The best card you can get won't run most of the game that are coming out now, it won't be able to support 3D if you are looking for that, and you Absolutely would need more system memory.

For example... I have purchased Diablo 3. Here are the requirements for it.
Windows XP, Vista, or 7.
GeForce 7800GT video card or Radeon X1950
Athlon 64 X2 4400+ or Pentium D 2.8 CPU
1GB ram for XP user, 1.5GB for Vista and 7, 2GB for Mac
That is the minimum

Recommended is
Windows 7
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz or AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+ CPU
2GB Ram
Geforce 260 or Radeon HD 4870 Video Card

With your PC... you can't upgrade to the minimum requirements for this game. It might be that time to look into just replacing the whole machine instead of trying to just upgrade the parts. Just my 2cents.

Thanks for your response, it was helpful however when I click "helpful" it says "Oops! You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to Mouse51180 again. " maybe I clicked twice, anyway thanks!