A little help on buying a graphics card.

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I was wondering if someone could help me. Im looking to upgrade my computer as its starting to get a little dated. The first thing i want to upgrade is my graphics card.

Now what i would like to know is what is the best graphics card available on the market that will...well basically put my Geforce 2 400/440 MX to shame and stilll pack a decent wallop against new games in 2-4 years?

Am Nvidia would be preferable as in all my years of gaming ive rarely had a problem with one of thier cards.


Also if i wanted to upgrade my processor (1.6 GHz) how would i do that?

Thanks in advance for any replies
 
Graphics cards wise the best cards available at the moment are the ATi Radeon x800xt pe and nVidia 6800 ultra. Both are incredibly fast and offer similar performance to one another.

However your processor will bottle neck the graphics card potential and to upgrade that you will most likely have to upgrade your motherboard before buying a new cpu.
 
You are looking at new:

*Graphics card

*Motherboard

*cpu

*Memory

*psu(power supply)

At the very least, best advice is to get budget together for the whole lot and tailor your upgrades to match your finances.
Bearing in mind , the graphics card is the easiest to replace and can be done any time after youve put all your other stuff together.

Having said that, if you want a fuss free upgrade for a low price you could go for the last breed of graphics cards only.
Anything up to a 9800xt will run flat out without your cpu being a major bottleneck.
This will allow you to stagger the overall cost of a major refit.
 
Pretty much, keep the monitor, speakers, keyboard, whatever, then you should just get a whole new computer altogether. Because upgrading all those parts are basically every part of the computer. You can even keep your old drives, cd drives, floppy, hard drives, so it really wouldn't cost too much, the graphics card will probably cost the most.
 
ye just tell us how much you have to spend
 
well im looking to spend about £4-500 in total. I shop from www.dabs.com/uk most of the time. For instance the Ram im looking to get from there 512MB SDRAM is about £70

My current specs are 1.6 GHz Pentium 4, 768MB SDRam, 64 Mb Geforce 2 400/440 MX 40 gb HD (starting to get a bit full).

Im not truly bothered about getting a super-duper card. Its just my present one is having to run on minimum settings on most of the newer games - eg Far Cry, id just like one that can hold its own for another couple of years or so and still look sweeeeeeeeet on some games (especially a certain one :) )
 
crap i dunno any uk sites to work with lol
 
I dunno pound to dollar conversions either. But I know 500 pounds is more than $500.
 
110+70+180+40 = ~400...maybe you could find better memory who knows
 
Thanks! Thats brilliant so i just take out my penitum chip and stick in the AMD one and the bios will auto pick it up?

Thanks again
 
ummm no. You need a specific amd motherboard. like the one vez specced a few replies above. An amd cpu wont even fit an p4 socket.
 
I would highly suggest you do not buy an Nvidia FX graphics card.
That series performs pretty low in todays high-end games.

The 6800 is an awesome card though. I would also recommend an ATI 9800Pro which usually runs around 200$ USD.

If you wanted to upgrade your CPU it would be very limiting to try to simply upgrade to the highest CPU model your board would support. It would probably support up to a ~2GHz P4 which wouldn't be very fast.
I would suggest a Athlon 64 cpu and board or a lower performing P4 2.4Ghz 'C' and board.
 
Asus said:
I would highly suggest you do not buy an Nvidia FX graphics card.
That series performs pretty low in todays high-end games.

The 6800 is an awesome card though. I would also recommend an ATI 9800Pro which usually runs around 200$ USD.

If you wanted to upgrade your CPU it would be very limiting to try to simply upgrade to the highest CPU model your board would support. It would probably support up to a ~2GHz P4 which wouldn't be very fast.
I would suggest a Athlon 64 cpu and board or a lower performing P4 2.4Ghz 'C' and board.
Click to expand...

I still find it very funny that you're telling people not to get Nvidia, while you display that you have one in your sig. :E
 
I would never get the FX card either...
 
Asus said:
I would never get the FX card either...
Click to expand...

The one he recommended wasn't an FX card though I thought. I'm just confuzzled.
 
Newer and faster card require more power than an AGP slot can provide so hence the additional power input. This comes in the form of a molex connector directly from your PSU. Make sure that your PSU is rated at around 350 - 400 min if you are considering buying all that new kit.
 
ummm....how would i find out about the rating of my psu? (power supply unit?)

thanks for the replies folks, guess im just not ggod with computer specs...i can shoot moving things on screen but after that.....brain hurts :)
 
To give you an idea of what ive just upgraded heres what ive just bought.

AMD 2600+ £60
1Gb Giel value kit RAM PC3200 £105
Asus A7N8X-E deluxe £60
Thermalright SP97 cooler £35
92MM ys-tech CPU fan £10

Roughly £270 in total. Now you may be thinking that a 2600+ isnt that fast but the barton cores are very good overclockers. My 2600+ is running at 2352MHz stable (i can play games for hours on it) and considering that the 3200+ runs at 2200MHz i would guess my CPU is running at 3500+ speeds? Maybe you could go for the same setup as me and save 60 quid by only going for a 512 mem module now and buying a second later on when you have the cash? Future games will need that 1Gb i assure you. That would leave around £300 for a graphics card and my recommendation would be a nice 6800GT as almost all of them OC to 6800u speeds anyhow.
 
that sounds pretty good , but how could i upgrade it all myself, just turn off the compu install all the new bits and let the bios deal with it?
 
well since you will have a new motherboard with that setup you will get a new BIOS too :E
 
You will most likely have to reinstall the OS if your upgrading your mobo. The wattage of your PSU will be written on its side somewhere.
 
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