YankCH,
If you only have a PCI slot, you're stuck with what you can get. None of the gaming sites I read even review pci video cards because they're not typically aimed at the gaming market. You'd be better off spending your money on a new motherboard that has an AGP slot and getting an AGP video card when you could afford it. Ask around in the general forum, hardware/software forum, or on other BBS sites to see if anyone has any experience using PCI video cards for gaming. My guess is that the results would be disappointing. At some point, you're just throwing money away using old/cheap technology and you need to save up for a while and make a larger leap in technology. Dell sells basic systems that have open AGP slots for under $600. AH is not terribly cpu dependent since it has only minimal artificial intelligence entities, so almost any modern system, pentium 4 or AMD athlon, will be sufficient if paired with a reasonably fast video card. PCI cards don't really fit that description unfortunately.
Nvidia "MX" cards are based on the GeForce2. That's right, "2". Those cards were designed years ago for directx 7. Avoid at all costs if you have any other options at all. The FX5200 cards are not much faster. They support directx9 but it's very slow, and a GF4-4200 will be faster running most directX 8 games, at least according to web reviews and benchmark summaries I've read.
I have a GF4-4200 (overclocked to around GF4-4400 speeds) and I've been watching the vid card market for a while because I want to know what cards are faster than mine when the time comes to upgrade. The thing is, you have to spend at least $150 or so to get one of the current DX9 cards (ATI 9 series, preferrably 9600 or better or Nvidia FX series, FX5700 or better) that will beat the GF4 in basic 3d performance. There are some image quality differences and some of the newer cheap cards are faster in some games, but those are pretty rare cases. Unless HiTech goes full-bore into directX 9 and requires DX9 hardware acceleration, the GF4 cards will remain very good inexpensive gaming cards, more than fast enough for AH2. Just don't get ANY nvidia card that says MX on it, because they are still based on the GeForce 2 and have somewhere less than half the performance of a GF4 card in most games.
For a rough performance guess at how any given card will run most games including AH and AH2, look at the 3dmark2001SE score. A Geforce4-4200 will usually score somewhere between 9500 and 12000 depending on how fast the rest of the system is. On my machine, that equates to between 50 and 85+ fps in AH at 1280x1024 resolution with anti-aliasing and ansiotropic filtering turned off, using an AMD Athlon 2000+ (1700mhz) processor. AH2 framerates vary a lot depending on the detail sliders and options, vid card driver, and beta release version, so I won't even guess what framerates I'll see in AH2 later on. From the early results though, I think that it'll be more than playable but not quite as nice as AH unless the detail levels are turned way down.
http://www.pricewatch.com lists GF4-4200 cards for under $80 and you should be able to find used ones for even less.
Sorry about the long answer... Too much time on my hands I guess.
