Resolved AMD Athlon XP 3000+ - suitable graphics card?

I'm going to be upgrading a friend's PC, and I was wondering which AGP graphics card was best suited to a AMD Athlon XP 3000+ (so there are as minimal a bottleneck as possible), particularly for the usage of The Sims 3? It has 1.5 GB of DDR1 RAM if I remember correctly.

EDIT: The CPU won't change from this (if it is indeed this PC that I work with, the whole thing is very complicated/convoluted) and I will be getting the parts from eBay or such, and won't be breaking the bank. And the PSU is a good 300W unit.

 

It's an NVidia GeForce 6200, and I don't see how it will limit an AGP graphics card that much, especially with the vintage of CPU.

 

Even with that vintage 300 Watts

 

What's with this? At that time 300W would power anything on the market. :lol: My other PC is running on a 300W power supply and probably won't need anything like that (P4 2 GHz Northwood, ATI Radeon R9550, although the fact its a newer PSU means it probably does due to the lesser 5V rail)

 

Luke, all I know is I have had to upgrade PSU's for systems with far lower specs than you've described, it does depend on other installed HW and quality of PSU I suppose but I wouldn't trust a 300W supply nowadays especially when 450/500's aren't that much more expensive.

 

Well, I'm surprised that you've had to upgrade power supplies for lower spec machines, because at that point 300W was basically the limit of what you could buy. You may not be factoring in that these machines run harder on the 5V and 3.3V rails than modern ones do, and the power supplies were designed that way. That power supply has done sterling service over many years.

The point is moot as I've discovered we won't be going down that particular upgrade route, but as such I'm now intrigued, REGARDLESS of power supply, which card would be best suited to that particular CPU?

 

Thanks, I think that answers my question.

 

@Luke - understand the graphic card can easily be the most power hungry device in the computer - by far! Also note that it is typical for older, especially factory made computers, to come equipped with PSUs that barely met requirements from the start, leaving little room for any upgrades other than, perhaps, an extra stick or two of RAM. Also note that PSUs (even the best made) lose power over time as components, in particular the capacitors inside, age. See Note 4 at the bottom of the eXtreme PSU Calculator Lite page concerning capacitor aging.