Mid range gpu recommendations?

So, I've acquired an old desktop that I want to do some light upgrade work on, mainly to make it into an emulation/indie box for when friends come over. Looks like it has a pci express 1.0 slot inside, so I figured I'd slap something in there, but I have to admit, I've not had to really look into desktop video cards since AGP was around. Any suggestions? I'm fine with paying 50 to 100 dollars I suppose, but I don't even know what specifications I should expect to get at that price range. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Froemdly bump

Lain, if you want a GPU recommendation, it is important to be more specific about the hardware you've got (processor, amount of RAM), and about what systems you want to emulate.

>7253 Oh, of course. I'm an idiot. Here we are. Naturally I'm almost certain I have extra ram lying around, but until I wipe the hard drive and install a suitable OS, 3GB is all I have installed. Feel free to suggest any other upgrades you think might be appropriate.

>>7297 It must have an AGP or pci x16 slot. The gpu on the list is integrated and mobos usually have an upgrade path left.

>>7297 The problem with this machine is that DDR2 RAM became a bit too expensive since production stopped, so upgrades can get a bit costly. I don't know if a recent gpu would support a x1 slot, if that's the only thing you've got. What I do know is that people use express card adapters with x16 slots on laptops (for example thinkpad x220). The express card is basically an x1 slot, so a system like this can potentially be adapted at the cost of losing some bandwidth, at least in theory. If you go this way, you should get a low or mid range card at most, because the bottleneck is going to be your cpu and ram speeds anyway. If the only thing you want to do is emulators, you should be fine going up to a Nintendo 64 with current specs. I'd keep Windows 7 as the OS for that. A new gpu is expand a bit what you can play, and provide some native decoding for newer video formats which could be useful too.

>>7330 Some quick search based on your speccy info gave me this image, so your board seems to have a full pcie slot, so disregard my previous comment about x1 slots. Take a look on nvidia 1030, I heard from a friend that it's good for video decoding, it's within your price range and could be useful to extend what you can play.

Fantastic. Thanks lain, I'll give that a look. As for ddr2 being out of production, like I said, my closet is home to tons of parts, so I'm sure I have some more. Don't know what the max capacity is for that mobo though. In any case, thanks a bunch for the help. Now I just need some ddr pads and I can force my friends to pay crypt of the necrodancer with me.

>>7334 No problem. If you manage to find some extra RAM and put one of these lower end recent cards, I am sure you can have some fun with this machine. Just make sure I've got the right picture and your board have the bigger x16 slot before you spend any money.

Op here with an update. Got the card, installed it, everything going great. > welcome to the nvidia geforce experience ! oh what is this trash > make an account with your Google or Facebook! No I don't want to make an account just to get fuarrrking drivers > but think of the features, citizen! Just let me fuarrrking install the drivers > I'm afraid you'll have to allow me to connect to the net before then, so we can register your geforce experience signup process, CITIZEN! I hate. Oh dear Odin, do I hate.

>>7571 holy soykaf i forgot all about that garbage. in theory, it's not a bad idea: having the ability to load custom configs tuned to whichever game you're playing, but in practice... it's like all windows freeware applications are in competition to see who can produce the most obnoxious taskbar widget. fwiw i think you can still just get the drivers from nvidia's website (at least you could a few years back when i last had to deal with it).

>>7571 >NVIDIA Telemetry Container I was the lainon who recommended nvidia, you can disable nvidia botnet-like services on msconfig (or on the task managed for win10), see pic related. I have disabled it for so long that I've forgotten it existed.

>>7616 >>7572 Yeah, I went to their website and got the barebones driver installer, and then looked up how to deal with the telemetry system. I told my dad about it the other day and he started ranting about how big data is everywhere and it's getting worse and how soon the IoT is going connect all of our devices to corporate datacenters. I had no idea my dad was so cyb. Hot Damn.