So here is the deal.  I just bought Rise and Fall:  Civilizations at War and what I was worried about happened.  My graphics card cannot play the game.  I am guessing this is going to be an ongoing occurrence with new games because my graphics card is old.  It has served me well, but I need to get a new one.  Right now I have an NVIDIA card and I would like to stay with that brand, but it really doesn't matter.  I was curious what graphics card you guys suggest.  I know there have been a bunch of these types of posts, but I felt like making my own. 

Price is not really an issue.  I would like to be able to pay my rent next month, but at the same time I would rather spend more money now and have the card last awhile, then going cheap and having to upgrade in less than a year.

I have a laptop.  It is an HP Pavilion zv5200.  It runs XP Professional.  It has an AMD Athlon (tm) 64 Processor 3000t, 800 MHz, 1024 mb memory and a 55 GB harddrive.

I am just looking for a very good to an awesome to the max card that will work with my computer.  Thanks for the help.

I wanted to do that with one of the laptops and they told me to buy a new laptop.  Unless yours can be upgraded, the graphics chip lives on the board, which means a new board and you might as well get another laptop at that point.   I know  Alienware's laptops can be upgraded with an actual card, but I'm obviously a nub at this.

You should be more like Cantrip.



Twitchy: "I pulled a Cantrip . . ."
GivePeaceAChance: "If the Tempest had nipples, I'd pinch that shit."
Xylicon: "I'm about to deliver my [Richard] in your face for posting that stupid shit. "
WDF?: "He keeps reaming me... night after night... I'm rather sore."
GivePeaceAChance: "OMG MY NIPS ARE HARD"
llenta: "cantrip, you fail!!!"
Filliam H. Muffman: "i'm on top of dick"