The good news is, if you’re trapped with a machine that has only PCI ports, I’ve found the best possible video card you can buy.

It’s an Nvidia GeForce 6200, with 256Mb on the board, DVI and VGA out, small form factor-compatible … all the recent bells and whistles and enough doo-dads to keep you happy for a few years to come. And the ‘egg has them for less than $100.

The bad news is really just for me: It doesn’t work in my PCI-X machine. The system boots fine without it, but when I insert it I get no video from either the card or the onboard adapter, and the system refuses to boot.

Putting the card in my trusty K6-2 550 gives me a video signal, so the problem isn’t the card, it’s the box.

And that’s where I plan to leave it.

For me, this is pretty much the death of PC gaming. I can’t afford to keep an entire rig state-of-the-art every year or so, and I’d much rather drop $100 on a leftover Xbox and play Fable now and again.

So I’m going to go a different direction. I’m not giving up on PCs — not by a long shot. But my gaming is going to be a console-based, and a step back in generations. It’s not worth the cost of staying in step with the technology wave.