Video Cards for a Vostro 220.

Hi there, I really need help.
I am an avid gamer, and after recieving a Vostro 220 (mini) as a gift, I have been using it for about a month. I am dissapointed in the integrated Video card it has. I would LOVE help in picking out a video card (prefered for around or under 100$) that could help me play games like Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress 2, Garry's Mod, and Borderlands. I am hopeless when it comes to computer hardware, and I have no idea what to do.
Please help!

How big is your screen and what resolution is it? For the games you want to play, i think you'll be quite content with something on the lines of a Radeon HD 4650 or 4670. At the moment, they're much under AU$100, which would mean they'd be quite cheap over there in the states. I could be wrong, but I believe the Radeon HD 4770 or Radeon HD 4830 are currently under US$100 and would perform quite well.

Btw, yes, 4830 is a higher number, but the 4770 is proven to perform better.

That's all I can really leave you with for the time being. Stick around, I think Stang will be around any moment and he'll give you plenty of details. :P

Welcome to DEV Wafflez
One other thing to consider is,what CPU you have.
Some games are more CPU dependant than GPU dependant.
What CPU do you have ???

For instance as you can see in my sig,i'm running a E3110 CPU (same as the E8400) and an 8800GT...at a resolution of 1650 x 1024 and settings maxed out 8x's AA and 16 x's AF and V-Synce off I get arould 120 FPS in L4D while a clanmate with a 4850 and an AMDx2 set-up only gets 60-80 FPS maxed out the same.

Gone are the days when you could have a (fairly) modern processor and a really good graphics card, and that would be fine for gaming. These days, the CPU has to be fairly well matched to the GPU otherwise you'll have suboptimal performance.

I'll briefly outline what we get a lot on these forums, namely about GPUs and performance relationship with screens and screen resolutions.

FYI, I'm going to use ATI cards as examples, one because I'm an ATI fanboy, and two, I know more about ATI cards than nvidia (and I would prefer to minimise misleading information).

For example, for a screen with a resolution of 1280x1024, a Radeon HD 4650/4670 will be quite sufficient and will do well to play modern games. It's been said that these cards will gladly scale to higher resolutions such as 1680x1050 with maybe a small performance drop.

Cards such as the HD4830 and above would be more suited to higher resolutions, such as 1920x1080 and above, and multi-GPU setups (Crossfire and SLI) really glow when the resolution is really really high (too lazy to look it up).

This, along with other factors such as your CPU should help you decide which graphics card you ought to pick out. A slow CPU will only hold back a much more powerful GPU.

Oh. and if you want to go Nvidia, i'd probably suggest a card on the lines of the GeForce 9800GT.