I Think It's Time...

[rabidrage]

I mean, I can't even play Doom source ports in 3D on this rustbucket of a computer. So what I'm currently looking at doing is upgrading by sticking in a new graphics card. Finally! So what kind do I want, people? I have an Emachines T2460, if that means anything to anyone. I just have to get something compatible and relatively good. For, like, 5-year-old gaming standards:P

[2-4-5_Trioxin]

Well you got 2 choices.

Spend 65 bucks on this which is about as good as your gonna get and not worth investing anymore in.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130452

Or

spend 400 (if you can that is) and get a entirely new pc that will be leaps and bounds beyond what you have. I know you didnt ask about a new pc but I thought I would lay this on you just for shits and giggles.

Emachines for the most part are like a snapshot in time, you can upgrade maybe a little bit at the time but its very limited, 5 years later? Not a chance. It has a athlon xp cpu in it which was obsolete and been replaced 3 or 4 times over. You have a 4x agp card meaning your limited on video card choices but anything newer you could find thats still in agp probablly will draw to much power and not run right, but if its integrated and you dont actually have a free agp slot the card I listed above does no good as you cant upgrade. You cant upgrade the powersupply since its propriatary. That thing is stock 256 megs of ddr ram, the minimum you really should windows xp at is 1gb and I dare say your probablly only expandable up to 512mb. Basically what Im saying is if you replace one piece, youll end up replacing virtually everything in the end. And that would be way more money and time than its worth.

You can buy a low end dell system for just about double the price of a new video card for your system anyway and the entire machine will be 2 generations ahead of what you have now. Have triple the storage space, be 20 times faster, run a hell of alot better. Just with what you have a really cheap newer pc will be worlds difference.

For 399 dollars you can get this. All thats missing is a monitor which you could add for not much more or just use your old one and has no speakers.

Intel® Pentium Dual Core Processor E5300 (2MB L2 Cache, 2.6GHz, 800FSB)
Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium Service Pack 1
Microsoft Works 9.0
1Yr Ltd Hardware Warranty, InHome Service after Remote Diagnosis
No Monitor
3GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 800MHz - 4 DIMMs
500GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/DataBurst Cache™
16X DVD+/-RW Drive
Integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3100
Integrated 7.1 Channel Audio
Dell USB Keyboard and Dell Optical USB Mouse
No Floppy Drive Included
No Modem Option
Mouse and Keyboard.
http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?oc=dddofa2&c=us&l=en&s=dhs&cs=19&kc=features~desktops_great_deals

The graphics card is about comparable to a geforce 6100 which isnt that great but this is again a better route and its actually expandable some so you could get a better card on down the line some.

I normally hate prebuilt computers and personally would never get one, I been building mine since the k62's hit the market and never looked back. But in your case its cheap and will be a giant improvement. Hell you could sell it whole or part it out and make 75-100 bucks on your old emachine since there is a market on ebay for people who need parts for theirs but cant get em.

[rabidrage]

That was certainly very thorough. Thanks for the facts. Now if I went the short-term route and replaced the graphics card, would that at least allow me to play Doom in 3D with the new source ports? That's literally all I want.