I want to go out and buy a real kick *** video card (one that's gonna last me a good handfull of years before i need to change it again), though judging from the looks, I'm gonna have to buy a new power supply too. So if i had 200-300$ for a video card, what would you recommend?
Some card that are 512M are worth more than the ones at 1G. Why is that? is it purely because they are a generation older, but more recently designed (i heard sumthing that an xx6800 is better than a xx7000, judging solely on its numbers at the end - question of its generation).
What card would you suggest?|||Video memory size is far from everything.
Some of the smaller 512MB cards are faster and better than the 1GB cards.
If you had 200-300 bucks, spend 150-200 on the card and the rest on a power supply.
I have an ATI 4870.
I bought it maybe 7 months ago, it costed me $265. These are now prices around $100 less than that, and it required me to get a new power supply.
This card runs everything, I mean everything, maxed out.
and yes, the nvidia card numbering scheme is actually pretty helpful.
An 8600 is about as good as a 7800. The first number means the generation, the second number means the type of card.
Second number reference:
8 - Gaming card
7 - Budget gaming card
6 - budget gaming/video enthusiast card
5 - general graphics adapter, 5 and lower are not really meant for gaming.
4 - HD video enthusiast card
The lower they go, the cheaper and worse they get.
get a newer generation, ie. 8000 series, 9000 series, GTX 2xx series.
The 8800, 9600, 9800 and all the GTX will come with power adapters, they need special power pins, and if your power supply doesnt have them, you can plug 2 of your standard 4-pin connectors into a 6pin adapter.
The GTX series require 2 of the 6 pin power cables, so if you dont have that many 4 pins to convert from, youll need a new power supply.|||NVIDIA 9800 GTX. Quite cost-effective, is at or is near the top of its series, and still going strong today! I have one and prices are lower now, and I don't think I need to upgrade it for another year and a half at least.|||head on to newegg.com where you can browse around for deals on graphic cards. plus all the reviews are on there. good luck.|||first question: http://alrightdeals.com/Item.htm?Id=S3_V…
but I replaced the heatsink with a fan/heatsink and it works great.
second... 512 with slow ddr is worse than 512 ddr3... look at the type of memory it uses... generally the higher the speed of the memory, the better the card.
as far as the numbers at the end... they are just numbers for record keeping (and for selling crappy cards to suckers)|||The higher the model number, the faster and more powerful the chip is. New generations, where the first number is higher, just means that the chip has some new feature, but you still end up with a slower low end that can't beat anything with a higher model number from the previous incarnations.
512mb of DDR3 is going to be more expensive than 1gb of DDR2, for instance. PCI-E costs less than AGP. AGP costs less than PCI.
If you're looking to use modern games, then you have to upgrade your card every year. They're designed to do that. You can purchase two decent cards instead of one great card for about the same price, and just run them in SLI. If your board isn't capable, then perhaps it's best not to waste your money until it is replaced.
You can get a usable card for about $50. You can get a decent card for $125. You can get a fantastic card for about $350. You can get two usable cards for far less than the other two, and it'll outperform either.|||I would get a GTX 280 or a 4890. The reason that some cards cost more than other cards that have a higher memory than itself is because it is faster than the other one. Say that I have a 2GB card from 2007 but it's slower than the one with 1GB because the 1GB one can handle more streams and has a higher memory clock(64-bit, 128-bit, 192-bit, etc...). Also its memory type is more modern and much more efficient than older types.|||You can't compare cards solely on mb/gb of video ram. Where one may have 1GB as compared to 512mb the type of ram could be different, say DDR3 vs DDR5, or the core clock and memory clock speeds could be different. In the end it's really quite difficult to compare cards just by looking at specs on a website unless you've got a degree in computer engineering. For those of us who can't be bothered with the details there are a few sites that get a hold of nearly every piece of hardware out there benchmark them and compare performance. http://www.anandtech.com/ and http://www.tomshardware.com/us/ are probably the most popular. Tom's Hardware goes as far as to post a monthly article for guys like you who simply want to know what the best bang for their buck is. I'd suggest picking something off their list, brand preference (ATI vs nVidia) it totally up to you. :D
Best Graphics Cards For The Money: April '09: (Simply click your price range....)
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/rade…
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