Well first off you need to make sure he knows whether or not his motherboard is of Nvidia chipset or ATI chipset. While I may be wrong, I'm sure that it isn't possible to place an Nvidia card on just any motherboard as the same with ATI.
In my opinion, I don't think he could go wrong with either video cards, I think they both are great cards. But when in doubt I find the place to go for a large availability of opinions is New Egg.
ATI Radeon HD4650
(The following are random opinions of customers from New Egg, and are in no way my opinions/thoughts.)
Pros: Runs cool. Uses little power. Very quite, Nice and small. Runs most games well.
Cons: Does not do 1080p resolutions over VGA!!! The specs state 1080p, but there is a catch. Not over VGA. This isn't stated anywhere in the specs but this card is crippled on the VGA side. You can only achieve 1080p, or similar high resolutions via DVI. Big bummer when I was setting up my media center.
HDMi is nice, but you can only have audio out at a time. So either HDMI audio, or speaker output. And switching between requires you to close all programs using audio to switch them back and forth. You will not have audio until you restart the program.
This isn't going to run Crysis at anything but min settings.
Other Thoughts: Good card for the price.
For the moderate gamer this is a good bet. However the crippled VGA kind of ruined it for me.
Zotac 9600GT
(The following is an excerpt from a review from
HEXUS.net it can be read by clicking on the link.)
In a nutshell, NVIDIA's GeForce 9600 GT 512 design liberally takes from the architecture that has made the more-expensive GeForce 8800 GT and GTS 512 cards compelling choices in the sub-?200 market and builds it into a cheaper GPU that e-tails for around ?120 for a default-clocked model.
We can recommend it to users wishing to play the latest fast-paced games at up-to 1,680x1,050 and with decent image-quality settings.
An outright recommendation-to-buy, given its ?140 asking price, is difficult due to the proximity of stock-clocked GeForce 8800 GT 512 pricing, though, and it is a better SKU. ATI's Radeon HD 3870, too, can be recommended at its new price-point of ?125, including VAT.
Bottom line: ATI raised the 2D/3D bar with the introduction of the Radeon HD 3800-series. NVIDIA's just beaten it in pure 3D and inched closer in all other areas. The winner is you, the reader. Buy a GeForce 9600 GT or Radeon HD 3870 for ?125 - both are great additions to any mid-range PC with an unused x16 PCIe slot.
I hope this helped, it may be a mouthful. But anything to speed up the thought process right?
