EVGA GeForce 8600 GT 256MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16 SLI Support Graphics Card 256-P2-N751-TR

Pros: Nice price (at least from Newegg and with rebate!). Card performs well and seems to handle moderate overclocking nicely (though not thoroughly tested, nor do I ever recommend overclocking to others).

Cons: Some vagueness on specs...Newegg didn't list PSU recommendations and EVGA's website says to have PSU that supports +12V @ 22A (non-SLI) but the manual says 18A (non-SLI). I bought a new 600W w/ 23A anyway.

Overall Review: This replaced a 7300GS card...I'm not a big gamer, but even playing around w/ the occasional demo just wasn't impressive, so this was a big upgrade, easily getting up to 2X+ the frame rate. 7900 cards seem to perform slightly better than this one at stock clocking, but if you MUST have Vista (BLEH!) for DX10 support, this is a great card for the price (ranks a 5.6 in Vista's performance eval).

Pros: decent value for the money back in the day. played all the games it needed to, but not that great looking graphics with games like Company of Heroes, etc. but with settings turned down it was fine.

Cons: card has intermittent issues since about 2.5-3 years after purchase. I personally had an 8800GT go bad on me and there are tons of similar chip video cards in desktop and laptops of this generation that just overheated and broke solder connections, so basically poor design due to an overload of power and not small enough transistors in its time.

Overall Review: I would expect much longer lifespan out of an $80 graphics card, no matter what the current technology spectrum looks like.