Cheapest card to "max out" Age of Empires 3?

[oxf77]

Hi,

I currently have an GT220 (yes rubbish I know but I dont play games often). With an E6600 overclocked to 3.4GHz and 8GB ram.

I would like to play AOE3 with the best graphical settings enabled and still no performance affected.

I am guessing it'd be better to upgrade my GPU. What is the cheapest card I could get to max out the best graphics settings on this card?

I saw this:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-028-KF&groupid=701&catid=1914&subcat=

- 384 Cuda Cores
- 900MHz Core Clock
- 1800MHz Shader Clock
- 2048MB GDDR3 Memory
- 1800MHz Memory Speed

seemed pretty good? Or am I spending more than I need to for such an old game?

 

[oxf77]

anyone?

 

[oxf77]

It is rubbish for games and I have no idea how it would do with age of empires 3. I have linked a GTX 650 bench results which looks ok in results but it still isn't great.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/681

If your budget is tight, look for a second hand 460/70 as that will do pretty well in games

Well my logic was that the game is 7 years old now, so a "cheap" graphics card today should have been able to handle it.

As I was wrong, would you be able to recommend a card less than £100?