I wouldnt advise buying that card, on the surface it looks good however not having a fan will yes produce more heat, also it will lower its performance, if your looking for a card that will last you a few years at a reasonable price I looked around on TigerDirect.ca and found that this is the card that I personally would choose http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applicatio...9600&CatId=694 , it's still near the leading edge of technology and although it has less VRAM, it is faster, which will yield better results in 95% of games especially since there is currently no game on the market that requires more than 64MB VRAM, having more is not always better. The AGP 8x/4x/2x thing is just the standard, 8x gives 2.1GB/s, 4x 1GB/s, and 2x I'm not sure on, however if your board only supports 4x or 2x an 8x card will run at the maximum supported, I have had an 8x card for almost a year now but up until about a month ago the board only supported 4x so that's what it ran at. I'm assuming since you have and play BF1942 that you must have at least a P3 or equivelant AMD, so the Radeon should run nicely, as you may or may not know only about 5 or 6 months ago the Radeon 9700 was the best of the best in ATI's line up, the 9600 was basically the affordable version of that, with slightly less VRAM speed. As to how long it will last do you mean how long the card will function or how long will it be able to play the latest games? In my opinion your hardware should last 4-5 years with no problems if you don't overclock it and probably longer. It should be able to play the newest games for almost as long, however not on the highest settings obviously, I currently have a Nvidia Ti4200 vide card with 128MB VRAM and 8x AGP, I pirated an un-official Half Life 2 Beta and it plays fine on medium-high settings, I haven't tried on high although I'd assume it will play just not smoothly. There is currently no game on the market that it can't handle on high or medium-high settings, of course this is coupled with an overclocked Athlon XP 2400+ (running at 2490mhz [ 166 x 15 ] with a 333mhz FSB) so depending on your processor it the games may or may not play as well.
Sorry for the long post but I just don't think that the FX5200 is a very good video card and think that the 9600SE would probably be a much better choice, although not quite as new, for the same price. Anyway, let us know what you end up with