Unfortunately all to common. Blame Intel (Dell, same thing). Intel has been foisting integrated graphics for a long time. The low ball prices suck in so many folks (particularly businesses) that Intel is the number one graphics provider--ahead of ATI and nVidia. (However, most of these are "business" PC's and things are far different in the home desktop market.) Even their latest integrated chipsets is 4 years behind the times performance wise. When they don't even give you an AGP slot you are completely hamstrung. Intel seems to like to do this as it undoubtedly lowers the price on the cheapo chipset by a few cents or dollars, plus it means you are likely to never even consider trying an upgrade to a real vid card--double whammy. If you make 50 million of these crap boards a year, a few cents or so adds up in a hurry. And if you can discourage people from ever trying a real product, that's a big plus too!

So much for the doom and gloom. Looks like you can get PCI cards in nVidia FX5200 or ATi 9200 flavors. Both chipsets are re-badges of ones that are so old that I can't tell you much about them now that they have been tweaked and renamed. From what little I've seen posted about them benchmark wise, they are no faster than the old AGP Radeon ViVo from three or four generations ago (it was a good card, three or four years ago.) I benchmarked that card at past 5,000 in 3DMark2001SE standard test with some overclock putting it near ATI 7500 speeds on an old Athlon XP2100+ with an ancient KT133A motherboard running PC133 SDRAM. That was just a curiosity test about a year and a half ago, when I no longer used that system for any gaming. (Yep, that old...) None of these cards will run in full hardware DX8 or DX9 from what I can tell (some will do software emulation.) Their basis is old DX7 architecture. The shaders are a considerable part of what make DX8 and DX9 different from DX7, and use of shaders is what you are starting to see commonly in new games. Therefore, don't even ask about 3DMark2004 scores, because shaders are effectively unusable with these cards.