Many new computer owners who don't have a PCI Express or AGP slot may feel that they're out of luck when it comes to playing 3-D games. Luckily, some vendors are still making PCI versions of decent graphics boards, so if you have a spare PCI slot, you can find a board that will beef up your gaming performance.

Mad Dog Multimedia's Conqueror FX 5200 comes in both PCI and AGP flavors and can be found for well under $100 (the $79.99 MSRP listed is for the PCI version, and the AGP version costs $5 less). If you watch rebates on the board, you can often find it closer to $50, earning it our Budget Buy ranking.

As you can probably tell from its name, the board uses NVIDIA's GeForce FX 5200 graphics processing unit as its power core. It's not a cutting-edge processor, but neither is it legacy. The FX 5200 offers support for DirectX 9, so it'll let you play all of today's games. You might not be able to turn on all the bells and whistles in the latest 3-D shooter, perhaps, but any system without an AGP or PCI Express slot will probably have bottlenecks other than the graphics board.

The Conqueror features a 250MHz clock on the GPU and 128MB of dedicated DDR memory. In addition to the standard analog monitor jack, the Conqueror also has a digital video interface (DVI) so you can connect it to a digital flat-panel display.

System requirements are extremely low (you can install the Conqueror in a Pentium II machine with only 64MB of RAM), so it's a great option for users looking to extend the gaming life of an older machine.

Installation is straightforward. Simply disable the on-board graphics on your system, power it down, plug in the card, boot back up, and install the software. There's no question of the difference in terms of gaming between this board and integrated graphics. Some games won't even run without a dedicated graphics card inside, and all games look better and run faster with one.

Mad Dog offers an incredible lifetime warranty on the board, so you know that you're protected in case something goes wrong. There's no software bundle with the Conqueror FX 5200, but if you're looking to get an older system up to speed or improve the gaming capabilities of a new system without an AGP slot, this board is a great buy.


Pros: Great price, good performance.
Cons: No included software bundle.

Warranty
lifetime limited