The Spirit Realm

Well... I have a top of the line AGP card wich is a GeForce 6800GT. It runs EQ pretty well. I run it with 1gb of ram with no real hiccups. Radeon 9600 is crap, hands down. Used to have one. If you get one for free try it. Do not spend cash on that old piece of crap, unless you get it for the price of a 6-pack of beer.

Problem is that 6800 family is old as hell. But if you can get a used one for a fair price I would go for it. Otherwise I would upgrade my entire setup to a new rig to the latest gen.

AMD dual cores are dirt cheap now and with a low to mid range current gen card you will be ok to run EQ plus have opportunities to upgrade.

I used to have Radeon 9200 and was considering going with a 9600. A friend lent me his 9600 and it was barely better than the 9200. I ended up getting a Radeon X1600 Pro (AGP 4x/8x) w. 512 MB (this was last year). My advice: Don't even think about getting a 9600. Bumping your RAM to 3 GB will be a bigger boost for you than going from the FX5200 to the Radeon 9600.

You can get a Radeon X1600 Pro w. 256 MB for around $75 at Newegg.com (512 MB will run you about $110).

Oops, sorry, those were PCI Express prices. The AGP versions will run you about $110 for 256 MB and $125 for 512.