An Intel 82845G Graphics Card

Dear Experts,

I have had an emachines 3220 for a few years now and thought it would be quite good for the price given (£699!). Although, it looked better than it actually performed and was also the only PC we were 'allowed' to get due to credit issues. Anyway, here is the problem. For the last year now, my brother and I were in the BIOS looking to configure the Video settings for my graphics controller (Intel 82845G/GL/GE/PE/GV Graphics) to try make it a bit better. We changed the settings to the best options available: not much settings.

Before we did this, I could run games with emulators such as Snes9x and was able to run Counter-Strike 1.6 much more better than now. Now, my CS 1.6 game constantly runs at 10-15 fps whenever there is any detail around, the Snes9x emulator runs small-detailed games at 30fps - where as before it displayed '50/50' (full fps constantly). Now I know that my graphics card is onboard and isn't really good, but I also know that it was performing much better before we changed some settings. I restored the settings in the BIOS back to the default settings, saved then restarted and it was still the same. I have updated the drivers for my graphics controller (they are quite old but they were still newer than the ones that came with the PC) and it hasn't worked. The driver update did make the graphics a bit more clearer in CS 1.6, making the fps rate even LOWER than before!

I am thinking of buying a new PCI graphics card but would also like to fix this annoying issue first. Also, can somebody tell me if a 'XFX Geforce 128MB Graphics Card with TV-Out Retail' is any good for £46.50 or if there is any other decent graphics cards available for a PCI-only supported computer - if that's not too much to ask. I don't want it to be too expensive aswell, please.

500 * Grade A (4) = 2000 :) All help would be appreciated.

P.S: I won't be here till tomorrow. I will be back around 3:45pm, or earlier.

Thanks,

# Nerd