Guys, My wife recently gave birth to our first child and needless to say that both money and time are scarce right now. I cannot afford to go out and buy a new computer or an Xbox360. I would rather buy a little better graphics card for my computer if you guys think it will help run games that are a year or two old. Current Specs: AMD Athlon 3200+ (2.2GHZ) Nvidia Geforce FX 5700LE (256MB, 8X) 512MB RAM In your opinions what is the best card that I could buy and would it actually help me any?? Should I buy more ram as well, or would that not affect gaming much?? This configuration didn't handle FAR Cry or DOOM 3 very well. I would like to be able to play them a little better as well as FEAR. Would a newer card even help?? Thanks for your time.
Congratulations of the new little one You'll probably get quite a few opinions on a good card but you may want to give us a ballbark budget so we can give you better recommendations. I just recently picked up an eVGA GeForce 6800GS for about $200 and it runs games like FEAR, Doom 3 and Half Life 2 very well. Adding another 512MB of memory will help game performance too.
Congratulations on the newborn!! Ram will help you game, but the video card is the most important. 1GB would compliment the video card choices I listed well, but you can hold off on that until after you see how the games perform with only the video card upgrade. By 5700LE 8x, I am assuming you mean 5700LE AGP 8x. The best AGP card would be the x850xt PE. Unfortunately that one is very expensive still. Now, for the games you described, you may benefit more from an nVidia card, but the AGP ones are far more expensive than the comparable ATi card and would not justify the performance increase. I think your best bet would be an x800xl or 6800GS (the 6800GS is rather hard to find though). However, here are some other choices that are good: x800GTO($130): http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814102609 x850xt ($240): http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814102570 x850 pro ($185): http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814102017 Geforce 6800 ($140): http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814140067 The 6800 is crippled, but can maybe be unlocked with something like Riva Tuner and the x800GTO can be flashed to an x800xl. If this guy is telling the truth, this is a great deal x800xl ($160): http://cgi.ebay.com/Diamond-Radeon-...824544796QQcategoryZ44986QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem If you want to go middle end, then a 6600GT, x1600pro, x700pro and 6800xt are possibilities, but I cannot find any at reasonable prices. Here is an x1600pro from ebay ($140): http://cgi.ebay.com/New-Sapphire-AT...823461651QQcategoryZ80190QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem 6800xt runs for about $140 and is a good deal weaker than an x800gto (Same for the x1600 pro), so I would not know about those. The one with the most bang for the buck listed here is the x800xl, if that guy on ebay is telling the truth because that will outperform a 6800GT in many games and play Doom3 at maybe 1280x1024 with high settings and eye candy. If not, the Sapphire Radeon x800GTO (the first link I listed) is the best choice in my opinion. The x850 pro should perform similar to the x800xl, but a tad slower. Sorry for writing so much, but it's late and I am tired, plus lots of options are always good.
Yeah man, I would atleast get 1 gig of ram in that bad boy. You will notice a huge increase in perfomance.
Ok. I will commit to upgrading to a gig of ram and would like to spend $200 on a GPU, shipped if possible. So, if you guys had $200, what would be your card of choice for most FPS games (mostly what I play on the computer.) Thanks again.
I've got an x800gto2 (same thing as x800gto, just a limited edition) and I flashed it to an x800xt bios (upgrades it to 16 pixel pipelines) and it runs anything that I throw at it beautifully. You can buy one that's already been flashed to x800xt bios on a lot of sites or on ebay for under 200 bucks. This would be my #1 suggestion just because I've had such a great time with it. If you don't have a problem with slightly used, this guy has exactly the card I have. You should buy it quick if you want it. You won't be disappointed. http://cgi.ebay.com/ATi-Sapphire-X8...ryZ80190QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem 150 bucks plus 15 shipping, so [bold]165 bucks bottom line[/bold]. Pretty good. Keep in mind of course that this is a PCI-E card. Hopefully that's not a problem.
The x800GTO2 is only available for PCIe motherboard and is essentially an x850xt, just with a different BIOS. For FPS games, nVidia cards outperform ATi card, but they will not offer you any extra resolution or eyecandy (except for Doom 3), just slightly better Frames per second. Here are some 6800GTs: http://cgi.ebay.com/BFG-6800GT-OC-2...8825603920QQcategoryZ3762QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem http://cgi.ebay.com/Nvidia-GeForce-...825913236QQcategoryZ64481QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem http://cgi.ebay.com/PNY-Nvidia-6800...824903509QQcategoryZ40161QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem The x800xl and 6800GT are very similar in terms of performance. The x800xl is faster with many games, but the 6800GT outperforms it in Doom 3 by a bit. Here is how I think they will compete in the games mentioned: Farcry: x800xl > 6800GT Doom 3: 6800GT > x800xl FEAR: 6800GT > x800xl Let price decide between the two. Be willing to spend a bit more on the 6800GT because it has SM3 support, so if you decide to get something like Tomb Raider Legend, you may be able to use "next gen" graphics.
