Video card complexities
As mentioned previously, I have been looking at getting a new budget video card to replace a dead Asus Geforce 256 V6600 Deluxe. I was looking at getting a used card because the information I originally found indicated that modern cards wouldn't work in an old 3.3V AGP v1 motherboard. Further research showed that most, if not all, Geforce cards will work on my motherboard, and many Radeon
variants would too.
After watching eBay auctions for a fortnight I have come to the conclusion that it is not worth buying a used card. It looks like the market has decided that cards are priced according to performance, and that used cards are worth 80% or more of the value of new cards of the same speed. That 20% is certainly worth spending if you don't want the concern of whether the card you buy has been overclocked to death.
There's also the problem of auction overexcitement. I spent an interesting few days watching an Asus 4200 (basic model, without video-in) creep up from $50 to its final price of $167. This was a particularly well-described auction, with accurate pictures, description, and included details of where the item was purchased originally and for how much. This would have added a noticable amount to the final price. Anyway, the interesting thing is that new Asus 4800SE cards, with video-in, are selling for $200. The 4800SE is a few percent faster than the 4200, but otherwise a very comparible product (same Nvidia family).
So, I moved on to looking at budget new cards. The cheapest cards were Nvidia MX440, but lots of people have been saying how bad their performance is. This is strange, because actual reviews of it are positive. The problem is that there are so many variants of the MX440. To start with, there's the MX440, the MX440SE, and the MX440-8. Just looking at the MX440-8, you can have 64MB or 128MB versions, with 64bit or 128b memory interfaces. The performance of a 128bit 128MB MX440-8 is almost twice that of an MX440SE. I think it's mainly the memory interface rather than the amount of memory that matters.
The difficulty here is that many online retailers don't give full technical details of their products, and sometimes the manufacturers' web sites don't either. In years gone by, you'd be sure that a Geforce 3 was faster than a Geforce 2 which was faster than a Geforce, but nowadays product naming is not indicative of speed at all. I think the MX440 takes the cake as having the worst naming scheme, leading to lots of people making blanket generalisations about the whole MX440 range. A rough guide is that the cheapest MX440s are 64bit versions, which you should avoid.