I'm looking at Fry's prices on video cards (Outpost.com = Fry's), and they suck big time. I don't think you're going to find much anything better at Fry's for cheaper unelss you buy online or used.

Cards to avoid:
Geforce anything MX
Geforce anything SE (EXCEPT the 5900se)
Geforce anything XT (EXCEPT the 5900XT)
Geforce anything LE
Radeon anything SE

Sometimes I think the graphics card manufacturers are purposely confusing consumers or something, because for someone who doesn't know the graphics card market, you can sure end up spending a LOT for a poor card for your needs.

I'm going to list a bunch of cards from newegg that are significantly better than what you bought. The order will be in approximate order of performance. For similar cards in the list, the nVidia cards will generally be better at Doom3 and the ATi cards generally better at HL2:
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduc...102-295&depa=1
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduc...240-014&depa=1
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduc...240-014&depa=1
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduc...131-242&depa=1
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduc...131-406&depa=1

These are suggestions that are priced closer to your ~$100 price point, where before the suggestions were more in the higher range, assuming you would be saving some money on the CPU end to allow for a little more leeway in the video card end of things. The 9800 non-pro is a big step up from the other cards. It will be something that should be able to last quite a while. The non-pro is almost exactly the same as the pro, but with lower clock speeds. In many cases these can be overclocked to be exactly the same as a 9800 Pro, but for less $$$

You can get other good values, but they're used. 9700 Pros were around $150, but you can't find them new anymore. Used they go for around $130. 5900XTs used are also good, and go for around $150 or less on eBay.

But these same cards at Fry's are like 50% more. I listed the 256MB 9600 because the 128MB and 256MB cards are the same price at newegg.

Having more memory is better, but the penalty is not huge for having less. It affects how much you have available for textures. In the case of Doom3, you have 512 MB = the textures are uncompressed (imagine an uncompressed BMP or TIFF image from a digital camera), 256MB equals a small amount of image compression (like a high quality .jpg image) 128 MB equals a medium compression (a mid quality .jpg) and 64 MB is high compression (a low quality .jpg). Keeping in mind that these images are mapped onto things moving around at a reasonable rate of speed, you have very little image quality loss going from 256 to 128 and virtually no speed difference.

If you are happy with the 5200, then that's fine. I didn't realize you had already bought it. If you can return it great, but if you have to mail order to get a replacement, that leaves you without a card for a couple days, and that pretty well sucks. I hate to see someone with a lesser card than they could have for the same money, so if you want to mail order something, you can borrow my 5900XT to fill in for the time between when you return from Fry's and you get whatever mail order card.

 

I don't agree with that statement.

 

If you had said 128 bit vs. 256 bit ( Sapphire had some 128 bit memory 9800 Pros for a while that they eventually renamed) I would agree with you, but the fact is still that the 128 meg (256 bit) 9800 Pro is a good value. The 256MB 9800 Pro is in a no man's land. It's too high priced to be a midrange card and it performs too poorly to be priced like a high end card. In my opinion the plain GeForce 6800 is a much better value than a 256 meg 9800 Pro.

The 256 meg 9800 Pro is not really much faster than a 128 meg 9800 Pro, A GeForce 6800 however, is significantly faster than both, and at newegg right now the difference in price between a GF 6800 and a 256 meg 9800 pro is a whopping $20.

I'm wondering where you're getting that the 128 meg version is 'garbage'

Here is an example of benchmarks that show no real difference. Halo is a pretty graphically intensive game:
http://graphics.tomshardware.com/gra...charts-09.html
128 meg: 55.17
256 meg: 55.17

Umm, so why is the 128 meg version garbage?
Given the choice of spending $200 or $265 for essentially the same performance, I'm gonna have to go with spending $200.

Also check out the Anandtech Doom 3 benchmarks I linked to above, the 9800XT (basically an overclocked 256meg 9800 Pro) gets totally owned by the GeForce 6800...
Ultra Quality @ 1024x768:
GF 6800: 67.4 FPS
9800XT: 40.9 FPS