With a budget like that if you are really scarce on cash, I'd look at ebay for buying a used videocard ( however ) this can be risky because you are taking the risk of buying a videocard that has overheated a few times to where the owner is unloading it before it burns out etc. I'd only buy through a merchant on ebay who backs their products with a good return policy, although most of them have very little warranty if any at all on parts such as video cards which are prone to getting cooked from inadequate airflow or people unlocking and overclocking them etc.
If you have any friends who recently upgraded video cards who have a card that is better than the one you currently have, you could also work out a deal to buy or trade something for their previous video card.
I have done lots of hardware trading between friends and buying good hardware inexpensively at like 20% to 50% of the cost new etc. All of my high end cards I have bought were ones I got from friends who upgraded and didnt need the card anymore and so it was money in their pocket for a part they dont need anymore etc, and at say $40 for a 2 year old video card that cost $200 new and hasnt been cooked to death, it was a sweet deal. This video card that was bought for $40 although 2 years old, was way better than anything else out there new for $40, and the closest new video card to match performance to the $200 card was a $120 video card.
When it comes to computers, I myself am sort of a penny pincher. I want performance, and yet I also dont want to dump too much money into it. So for a new computer, i will reuse pretty much everything but the motherboard, cpu, and ram which generally gets me a new system built from the prior system for around $150 to $250 for an AMD build, with $60 to $100 for motherboard, $25 to $50 for RAM, and $65 to $100 for CPU. The video card I generally migrate over to the new build since I usually paint myself into a corner with a CPU that eventually becomes the bottleneck in which most of the time its a replacement of Motherboard, CPU, and RAM. However with AMD builds I have stretched the life of some systems further by taking advantage of the Socket AM2+ socket in which the system was originally built as a dual-core socket AM2 in 2008, and yet the motherboard after a flash can take a Phenom II x4 CPU and stretch the gaming lifespan of the motherboard another 3 or 4 years vs having to retire it as the main gaming rig. Also as far as power supply goes, I dont use cheap power supplies on my gaming builds and so it generally has no problems with the new hardware load which is greater than the prior build. This gaming system though is nothing pretty in appearance. Its basically newer hardware installed into a Compaq Presario case from 2004. So absolutely no modern bling to it. In addition to this though I drilled a small hole into the face of it and added a wire pair extension to the NIC activity LED, and relocated the NIC activity LED on a PCI 100mbps NIC to hot glued into the face of the computer. This allows me to look over at the computer and see when any unusual or unexpected network activity is happening vs having to look around the back of the computer. I sort of copied this NIC activity concept from some servers I have worked with that show the NIC activity for 2 adapters. Thats the only bling factor I guess it has is a relocated LED for the NIC..LOL
Lots of people buy gaming systems and hardware and get sucked into the " costly cycle " of having to buy top of the line hardware every 3 to 5 years in which its usually a totally new computer. This is wasteful of money, but i generally take advantage of this waste in the upgrade path it gives me very inexpensively. I myself will spend about $50 to $100 a year on a computer, and with hardware always evolving into the next build pretty much when i retire the hardware its only really good for use on older games etc and outside of spec of a modern gaming system, but i get the maximum use out of the hardware vs having to have a system that is top of the line in performance. So at $50 to $100 per year this places my 3 to 5 year lifecycle of hardware components at a cost to me of just $300 to $500 tops vs spending double or tripple that amount. Also its softer on the wallet with $50 here or $100 there vs a $1000 purchase etc.
