Saluton,
The 9200 is ok, and would be better than your MX440, but it's not going to be crazily better ... only a bit.
Without knowing your budget, I'd say go for either a 9100 or a 4200 if you can stretch it to there. THEN I would say that the improvements would be significant.
Regarding AGP 4x Graphics: 8x cards are AGP 3 standard and will be backwards compatible to AGP 2 but will run at 4xAGP speed only. The reverse is also generally true. The problems that occur are mostly to do with voltages ... so check that your card and slot can run at the same voltages. 1.5v is optimum for compatibility. It's unlikely you will fry anything as the slots and cards are 'keyed' to prevent this, but it is possible to end up with a card you can't plug in. In your current situation this is not the case.
Also, there is no humanly discernible difference in graphics speed of 4xAGP cards when compared to 8xAGP cards. The only time you might notice would be if you were to run some game or program that needed to use a massive amount of textures using AGP texturing. I am not aware of any game available that would do this.
The 5200 is directx 9 compliant and so will run ok in directx9 games. The 9200 (also the 9100 and 4200) is directx8 compliant and so will do well in dx8, but not so well in dx9. Your mx440 is a dx7 compliant card sup'ed up to do better in dx8, but it's still really only dx7 - it will do dismally in dx9. Tho' the 4200 is not dx8 compliant, it is still often a better card than the 5200 in dx9 and much better for dx8.
Hope that wasn't too confusing!
Here is a good shortcut:
http://www4.tomshardware.com/graphic...714/index.html
The benchmarks section compares all the cards mentioned above. Note that the 9100 is referred to in these benchmarks under its old name the 8500 and the 9200 is a slightly quicker (~5%) version of the 9000.
Enjoy!
Regards,
Elad.
Linear Mode
