New Graphics Card

Citrus

Citrus

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Ok, i've got an ATI Radeon X1300 Pro that i've had for a year now. It plays all the games i own nicely, but im looking for a new one. With all these great games being released, i'd like to get a decent card so I dont have to play them on low/medium settings.

I need advice on whether or not I should wait for the prices to go down or buy one now & if so what card should I buy.

Any help is appreciated :)
 
the X1650 pro 512MB is good. Got it at the beginning of this month and it work just fine on very high but most games just put it to high. It is quite cheap @

*GBP 35.25 PCI-E
*GBP 39.17 AGP


from cclonline.com. if you live near bradford, w.yorks, you could go and pick it up. otherwise postage isn't too bad.

*it wont let me put bloody pound signs
 
Thanks alot cjohnso. Could you tell me what games can it run those settings on?

2real, its a bit expensive for me.
 
The x1950xt is a very good directx9 card but with the new 3850 and 3870 you may want to look into those if your on a budget.

Theres a post on another forum that talked about how AMD wants to lower the price on the 3000 series already so you may be in luck.
 
The X1600 won't be worth an upgrade over the X1300. You'll want to go with at least an ATI X1900 / Nvidia 7900 (DX9) OR ATI HD 2600 / Nvidia 8600 (DX10).

The HD 3850 has quite a bit of performance for it's price. Lot faster than the cards I mentioned above. Step below the 8800gt.
If you want to get the best price make sure you buy online too. Cards are always more expensive in retail stores.
 
@citrus.
The X1650 pro can run all the OB games on high, and most other games apart the EXTREMELY demanding. but as cjohnson said, it is quite cheap, although a good card.
 
8600GT is an awesome card for its money. And its DX10 ready.

I currently have them on SLI, and with a slight overclocking session, i increased my fps by around 10 in Crysis to about 20-25 on 1280 res and max settings.

I spent ?95 per card, coming to ?190 on 2 cards that perform just as well as a stock 8800GTS stock card..well maybe not just as well, but not far off. Saved me about ?50.
 
Bear with me, digging some numbers up here.
Here is Oblivion @ 1024x768 high quality but with AA and AF disabled. Their lowest setting tested for the game. Fairly demanding game yet the settings are average. Not too much difference between the x1300 pro and the x1650 pro which is at an average of 10 fps (2.8 FPS faster). The 8600GT and 8600GTS are above 20 fps. X1950 pro is at 26fps. Obviously you wouldn't play at those frame rates but it gives you an idea of the difference in performance.

For reference, this review shows the HD 3800 series and 8800GT at least 30fps faster (77+ FPS) than the 8600GTS @ 1280x1024. They probably used a faster CPU for this review so that would be why the 8600GTS tested faster than in the previous review.
 
Thanks for all the help so far.

I've just got CoD4 and even after turning the anti-aliasing up to full the graphics are pretty poor. Any card that could run it reasonably well would be fine for me (not looking for a max setting Crysis card ;)).

Also, what is the advantage of having a 512mb card over a 265mb card?

Thanks again.
 
What's the advantage of having 512MB RAM over 256MB RAM?

same thing. It is slightly faster, and can take bigger files and process them.
 
Higher vram usually means you run better in higher resolutions.
 
Don't both with more than 256MB unless you get a fast card that can really take advantage of it. Otherwise you spend more money on the 512mb version for basically no improvement.
 
So, my final decision.

I have a 100 GBP budget. Which card would be the best for me?

(Doesnt have to be the most expensive).

Also, i've heard about people using dual cards in their system. Would it be better for me to get 2 cheap ones than 1 better card?

Thanks
 
Citrus said:
Also, i've heard about people using dual cards in their system. Would it be better for me to get 2 cheap ones than 1 better card?
Click to expand...

Nah, way more effort and would probably cost more in the long run (getting a capable psu, cooling, etc)
 
ĐynastҰ said:
I spent ?95 per card, coming to ?190 on 2 cards that perform just as well as a stock 8800GTS stock card..well maybe not just as well, but not far off. Saved me about ?50.
Click to expand...

Yeah in what 25-50% of cases? In the other 50-75% the GTS is absolutely smashing your SLI set-up there.

GOLDEN RULE
-----------------

1 Excellent Card > 2 Cheap cards.
 
The overclocked one is 256mb and the other is 512mb. However the 256mb is more expensive...

Thanks for the links - i'll probably go with the 8600GT. Could you tell me what "overclocking" does?

Cheers for all the help guys, saved me alot of time and money ;)
 
Citrus said:
i'll probably go with the 8600GT. Could you tell me what "overclocking" does?
Click to expand...

Graphic cards have two 'clocks' - A memory clock and a shader clock both have some hundred MHZs, overclocking mostly involves increasing the megahertz that these 'clocks' run at.
 
My x1800xt is playing most games on high settings thus far. Good little card.
 
Citrus said:
The overclocked one is 256mb and the other is 512mb. However the 256mb is more expensive...

Thanks for the links - i'll probably go with the 8600GT. Could you tell me what "overclocking" does?

Cheers for all the help guys, saved me alot of time and money ;)
Click to expand...
If you're going for the 8600gt then the cheapest you'll probably get it is Novatech, although it's Novatech's own version but it seems to get good reviews in the reviews tab:
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?NOV-86GT5
 
@citrus,

Overclocking is running a peice of hardware faster than the recommended speeds.
 
Nemesis6 said:
Graphic cards have two 'clocks' - A memory clock and a shader clock both have some hundred MHZs, overclocking mostly involves increasing the megahertz that these 'clocks' run at.
Click to expand...

3 actually, you forgot the core clock. Shader clock is the most recent.
 
So overclocking increases the performance.

Wouldnt that damage the card?
 
not unless you do it a lot, for example 500MHz. The recommened settings are slightly lower than the card can do. It is put in there for several reasons, but one is that you can overclock it without damage.
 
What's commonly done as far as overclocking goes is that you increase the megahertz of the three cores(Thank you Sedako! :)) by increments of 5, run a game for some time, and keep going untill you spot the slightest image quality problem - This shows that the card is having trouble.
 
Citrus said:
So overclocking increases the performance.

Wouldnt that damage the card?
Click to expand...

It may or may not. Most chips, both CPU and GPU, are pretty conservative in their stock speeds. So why don't they ship them clocked faster? Well, they're shipping a bunch of products that are all supposed to be the same, but in reality some chips manufactured are better than others. If they clock them all slow, they can sell all the chips and they'll all work well at that speed. If they clock them all faster, they have to throw out the worst ones if they become unstable or get damaged, increasing their costs. Another possibility is to sell them at multiple price points, putting the chips that are tested to be able to handle it on higher-end more-expensive boards than those that don't perform as well.
 
which it is why it is better pre-overclocked,. because the card can handle it.
 
Little threadjack here, but it saves making an entirely new one.

I'm looking to upgrade ny card too. I've got a nVidia GeForce 6100 nforce 405 and it's just not cutting it anymore. It plays HL2, BF192,the orignal total wars and UT2004 fine but I've recently bought Bioshock and it doesn't handle it very well, even on the lowest settings. Plus for work I make research projects/VE's using various programs so I need something that can run most things well.

I'm getting another two sticks of RAM (hopefully today :) ) which should beef it up from 2gb's to 4gb's. But that's not going to do great deal for the graphics is it?

So, assuming my specs are...
AMD Athlon 64 4000+ Dual Core
4GB Memory
250GB
....what graphics card would you recommend? I don't really want to be spending a great deal more than say ?70-80 if I can help it. Unless of course a little bit more will go a long way in terms of performance and not having to upgrade for sometime.

thanks ! :)
 
Thanks Asus, Sea for the links. I've gone for a 8500 GT Super, 512mb/128bit. Just bought it scant hours ago from the local friendly PC shop. Below the price range, and unless I've missed something it should work well enough for my purposes.

Now this is going to sound awfully noobish. And I guess it is. Graphics cards are something I've never really worked with. But anyway, I've come across a problem. I'll take you through it...

I opened up my PC (lovingly called Godzilla) to find the old graphics card and remove it. But it's not there, apparently it's onboard. Meh, I shrugged at this and continued. I put the new card in the PCI-E slot securely and started Godzilla up. My screen was blank because it said it was recieving no signal. I did hear the windows jingle though so it had loaded up, it just isn't showing.

I thought maybe it was the drivers so I shut down, took the card out, tried to install the drivers first. It won't let me because the new card isn't in, and the drivers aren't compatible with the old 'card'.

So I thought maybe I needed to disable the old 'card'. I went to system>hardware and disabled it, restarted for the change to take effect, shut down and then stuck the new card in. I got the same blank screen.

I checked inside and it seems to be recieving power. The fan's going anyway. So i don't know what's going on. Anybody have any ideas?

Is there supposed to be some sort of connecter with it that I'm missing?

Sea
More RAM might decrease your load times for games a little bit and whatnot, but honestly it's not going to do too much for you unless you're into video or audio editing and need to have tons of files loaded at once. Even 2GB would be enough for that unless you're really serious about it.
Click to expand...

:) Yeah I do a far bit of video editing, or will be anyway. I'm going to have an awful lot of programs running for some of my research. But also...I tend to play Football Manager 08 and the RAM should give a reasonable boost there. It's low on graphics but high on loading!


Anywho, thanks for the help so far. Some more on what's wrong would be great. Sorry if I'm asking a glaringly obvious question.


*Edit*
Forgot to add, I've tried the monitor (17" TFT) in both the normal port and the one on the graphics card. I get no signal for either of them.
 
ATI's 3800 series is just above your price range
Click to expand...

I found that card for 150 GBP. Thats quite a bit above his price range.

Did you find it really cheap somewhere else Asus?
 
Enable the onboard video. Start up windows so the monitor works. Uninstall the drivers. Shut down or restart to get into the bios. Disable the onboard graphics and turn the PC off. Put the new card in. Start up and there shouldn't be any conflicts in Windows (drivers are uninstalled).
Citrus said:
I found that card for 150 GBP. Thats quite a bit above his price range.

Did you find it really cheap somewhere else Asus?
Click to expand...
The 3870 might be the one you saw. The 3850 512mb is here and the 256mb is less.
 
Would disabling it through system>hardware work or should I just do it through BIOS?

Thanks for the help so far :)
 
further threadjacking

my 8800gt finally shipped ..the evga SC, got sick of waiting for the evga SSC ..but purolator tried to deliver it but no one was at home ..so it's at the depot and I cant pick it up tonight cuz I have a charity thing to attend and wont be home till it's late ..so may have to wait to either tommorrow or on the weekend
 
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