Shopping for a new Graphics Card

Alphadrop

Alphadrop

A right proper chap.
When in doubt on what new graphics card to get, ask a lot of people who play old RPGs. :V
... Well and the Witcher 2.
Pay days a comin' and I'm thinking of upgrading my old 8800gts 320mb card. She runs o.k but that 320mb is a little behind the curve.

The webs so overloaded with suggestions and I'm kinda lost on anything after the 9x series so help would be appreciated.

Thinking of something around a GTS 250/9600 kind of thing.
 
What's your budget dude ? I'd suggest you visit www.techpowerup.com , they make a lot of GPU reviews, in each of them is comparison of about 50 GPUs in terms of pure power, power/dollar and power/watt, in different resolutions. Hope it helps
 
About 150 bucks then, in that range GTX460 or better HD6850 if you find one. Flashing HD6870 BIOS into it makes even better bang for buck
 
Xellos said:
About 150 bucks then, in that range GTX460 or better HD6850 if you find one. Flashing HD6870 BIOS into it makes even better bang for buck
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If it's 100-150 dollars the GTX 460 is a good choice and probably the highest performance per dollar right now. I would recommend the MSI Cyclone or Frozr. Make sure it's the 1gb model and not the 768mb. If you're running an older board and/or don't have very much wattage on the power supply, you may be better off with the GTX 250s (thereabouts) since your CPU will be the bottleneck.
 
The Ati cards seem to have some issues with SSAA and general picture quality.
I'd also say get the GTX460.
 
I'll take a look see at the GTX460, clocks in around average of £130 - £150 which is a bit above my price range. Assuming I don't get docked pay for the massive cock up I managed today I'll probably get one.
 
Alphadrop said:
I'll take a look see at the GTX460, clocks in around average of £130 - £150 which is a bit above my price range. Assuming I don't get docked pay for the massive cock up I managed today I'll probably get one.
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Make sure your power supply is about... eeeh 700+ watts at least.
 
korindabar said:
Make sure your power supply is about... eeeh 700+ watts at least.
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Reading up on that it suggests about a 500 watt supply unless you are going SLI or overlock, which I don't do as my equipment breaks down often enough without it.

The cock up was only loosing £98.01 at the convenience store I work at. Well massive compared to the most anyone else looses is about 5 quid.
 
Well I'm playing Brink at the moment which uses OpenGL so steering clear of ATI. :P
Yea, probably going to cash out for a 460 as it looks nice. My monitor only supports up to 1024x1280 so the resolution isn't a worry.
I have a modular 500 watt psu so the pins aren't a problem, brought it two months ago when my last one conked out.

Thanks for the replies y'all.
 
Oh, some ATI cards are having trouble with some of the newer games using OpenGL instead of Direct3D. Not sure why really.
 
Either get an nVidia GTX 460 1GB, or spend about $20 (American) more (and ignore the ATi/OpenGL thing which is 99% guaranteed a non-issue) and get a more powerful Radeon HD6850. Those are the best cards in your price range.
 
I could recommend some hot and noisy video cards if the silence is freaking you out. ;)
 
I recently replaced my failing 8800GT (they all seem to be failing right about now, judging by the board posts I've read) with a Radeon 5770. Not the newest, shiniest, most expensive GPU, but better than my old one and much, much quieter.

The ATI driver interface is clunkier and less intuitive than NVIDIA's, but the GPU itself has been great. Haven't had any problems to speak of. Switching from one brand to another was no problem.
 
Looking into an upgrade, budget is $200. According to manufacturer's website I have support for two PCI Express x16 Gen 2 graphics cards up to 150 watts. I have one card at the moment, NVIDIA Quadro FX 580. How do dual card setups work? Would I benefit more from getting another fx 580 or a single better card? Or am I able to get a better card than that and set up a dual card with my old one? My power supply is 850w, which I assume is more than enough to handle the extra card.

Here's my specs n stuff, straight out of Speccy

Operating System
MS Windows 7 64-bit SP1

CPU
Intel Xeon E5503 @ 2.00GHz 46 °C
Gainestown 45nm Technology

RAM
12.0GB Triple-Channel DDR3 @ 398MHz (6-6-6-16)

Motherboard
Dell Inc. 0CRH6C (CPU1)

Graphics
DELL 2408WFP (1920x1200@59Hz)
NVIDIA Quadro FX 580

Hard Drives
244GB Seagate ST3250318AS (RAID) 29 °C
313GB Western Digital WDC WD3200AAKS-75L9A0 (RAID) 31 °C

Optical Drives
PLDS DVD+-RW DH-16ABS
DTSOFT Virtual CdRom Device

Audio
TRI-CAPTURE
 
If you are willing to spend a little more I would recommend checking out the "560ti Twin Frozr II". It's a factory overclocked / quiet version of Nvidia's 560ti card.

It runs all recent games on high / ultra settings at your native resolution (your CPU is a pretty huge bottleneck though).

You wouldn't really benefit from getting another Quadro 580 card, combining cards (SLI) is not worth the money IMO unless you have a multi-monitor setup and use some crazy high resolution.

It might be possible to leave your current card installed and use it for PhysX calculations in certain games.


Detailed review, benchmark etc:

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/MSI/GTX_560_Twin_Frozr_II_OC/
 
Farmerk said:
Looking into an upgrade, budget is $200.
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Don't bother getting a 2nd one of the outdated one you have, unless your budget changes drastically before you buy. Here is a great website with comparison charts you can reference: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/. They cover CPU's, video cards, and hard drives. They get their data from users like us who download software to run on their computers at home. That software then loads performance data back to their website and generates these charts. I don't believe everything I see on these charts, but it's a handy general reference.

Back to your original question; if you have $200 to spend, shoot for a current, relatively high end card. The Nvidia GTX 560 is within that price range. However, it is effectively a GTX 560ti with some of it's processor cores shut down. A 560ti can run you from $210 to $280. Newegg.com has great search filters that can help you narrow down your options.
 
Yeah and you can very easily overclock the 560ti Twin Frozr cards even further (they come with a much improved cooling solution) so their performance nears that of the much more expensive GeForce GTX 570 (360$).

IMO it's currently the best "bang for buck" card on the market.
 
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