More Awesome Than You!

Hi all,
I'm upgrading my RAM and doing a few other things to try and avoid CTDs and errors of various flavors. I also want to upgrade my graphics card. I currently have a Geforce 7950 GT from about 5 years ago. The guy helping me with my upgrades noted it's a PCI express. He also said I have a very good motherboard. Anyway, I was hoping for advice on the best card to get to replace it. No way can I afford anything brand new. It would be nice for the card not to exceed $100. It would be great if you Awesomepeople would recommend a good card for me, as I am clueless and would likely choose poorly on my own.

Thanks in advance.

Do you have a preference between ATI and Nvidia? I'm guessing not, but you never can be sure.

ETA: Anandtech's Holiday 2011 Budget PC guide (http://www.anandtech.com/show/5005/holiday-budget-system-buyers-guide/4) is probably a good place to start. They recommend AMD/ATI cards as the best bang for your $100 budget.

Thanks for the response and for the link. As you pointed out, I have no preference. Actually one of the reasons I came here to ask about it was in case there was wisdom about which is better. The guy doing the upgrade asked me which I liked better, and I, of course, have no idea. Making a note of the AMD/ATI recommendation, thanks again.

Nvidia is going to cost you more money than an equivalent AMD card. However, support and built in tools for Nvidia tend to be better in my experience. As a side note, I have no first hand experience with non-Nvidia cards (outside of onboard cards), just in helping friends with theirs.

Isn't this thread in the wrong section?

Starler, thanks, problem resolved due to your link and advice.

Virgali, yes, sorry, you are right of course. I didn't know where to put it. I figured it was a form of pudding but it probably isn't. Thanks everyone for your patience. Please feel free to spork the hell out of me.

My expert opinion is that, Simswise, your card is fine. The only reason to upgrade it at this particular point in time is if you plan to do more than Sims. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Unless you use Monitors of Unreasonable Size and play on gigantic resolutions, I have not noticed any real performance difference between the computer with the top of the line video card (at least as of two years ago), and a computer with an ancient X1900, a card even older than yours. TS3's performance bottlenecks are all based on its inefficient CPU usage and inability to benefit from multicores.