So I have been having problems with my currrect video card because the fan went out, and it has made it so i can't play a lot of my games with out serious bugs. I don't have much money so upgrading my whole comp isn't much of an option. I'm looking for an agp 4x (1.5v) card under $200 (i'm willing to spend slightley more if the performance upgrade is worth it.). I want to play the latest games (mainly BF2) with nice looking detail at a decent resolution. I have posted about this before (back in august) and i was told to get the XFX 6600gt http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814150096, but because the post was so long ago i figured i would inquire again.
i was also told that the 128 version of the card would out perform the 256, because it had ddr3 but the card from newegg that i posted above was a 256 and it said it had gddr3 (i don't know what the g means) so has something changed in the past 6 months? plus how much of a performance difference would having a mobo that supported agp 8 appose to my 4?
Rather than replace the GPU which will be costly, you could try buying an arctic cooling replacement heatsink fan unit. I think you can get ones for a 9500 pro (I think it's series 1 you need), they cool the card better than the normal cooling solution, and they're quite quiet, not to mention cheaper than replacing the card.
256MB is marginally better than 128MB but there's a reasonable difference between 8x and 4x so I'm not sure how fast you could run a 6600GT at 4x. Best to do the option in the above post really, else you could be wasting money.
so i'm going to go with a CoolForce III, from what i've heard it seems to be a good replacement for my old fan. I just hadn't really done too much research on the card i had, and i got it second hand so i figured that it was just a old crappy card. but my next question is; is there a possibility that i caused permanent damage to my gpu because i have used it so long w/o a functional fan?
