Currently I’m running a Radeon 9800 Pro. I forget how much RAM my system has, or what its main processor is — and I’m at work at the moment, so I can’t check.
I’ve had this video card for quite a while now, and I’m lazily thinking about upgrading to something else. What advice can anybody give me about new(er) graphics tech, what to look for, benchmarks for various cards, and that stuff?
Are playing games or making them?
Just playin’ em. I recently got Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and my old 9800 just isn’t beefy enough to really get the full treatment. It runs, but choppily at times.
Anything “new” from nVidia or ATI will be better. I’d go for a GeForce 7 series. Personally, I’m saving up to shell out for a Quadro FX, but those doesn’t run games very well.
Yeah… uh, I figured that the products released in the past 2 years were intended to be improvements over what I had.
I was more hoping for benchmarks for the various cards, or maybe advice like “don’t by the MuckVision 2000 with the go-faster stripes because it was released with production design flaws; get the 2010 instead.”
I bought a GeForce 6600 (AGP) with 256 MB of memory made by PNY and am quite happy with it. It was about $150 at Best Buy and it does the job nicely. It can handle a somewhat older game like NWN at full settings. I haven’t thrown anything brand-new at it with requirements higher than Civ IV or Pirates, though.
I just nosed around at Circuit City’s and BestBuy’s websites. Turns out the new Radeon cards require Windows XP in order to run. (Still running Win 2000, here.)
I’d recommend any Nvidia model 6xxx or above (e.g. 6600, 6800, or 7800). These have support for shader model 3.0 so will make quite a bit difference with the latest games.
I don’t beleive any ATI card supports this at the moment (Though could be wrong last time I checked was a few months ago).
That’s weird… I just checked ATI’s own website and there’s no mention of requiring Windows XP for any of their recent cards. Maybe some monkey at Circuit City typed it in wrong, or ATI isn’t telling me everything.
I guess what I gotta do is go get the actual box in my hands and read what’s printed on the side.
How hard is it to switch between a Radeon and an Invidia card? I heard once that their software doesn’t like each other very much.
I expect that you are running an AGP motherboard.
PCI express has been out for at least a year now and as a result, the fastest and the newest gfx cards are aimed toward PCI express.
In other words AGP is slowly dying.
Nvidia have reeningineered some of their cards, notably the 7800 for AGP and no doubt there is still some life in AGP yet as ATi do the same.
I would not consider spending very large amounts for AGP cards for this reason, its likely you will be replacing your system in the next few years and unfortunately you will not be able to carry all that much from the old one to the new one, which matters if you are trying to do this on a tight budget.
You might need to consider your power supply too, some of the later AGP cards consume lots of juice, and if your system is already loaded up, two or three hard drives, lots of banks of memory, Pentium 4 processor etc, thre is a goddly chance you will need another power supply.
I think you would do well getting a Nvidia 6600 oc card, this is a card which is already slightly overclocked, not by much actually, but it has the manufacturers warranty and gives you just a little bit more peformance.
Another good option would be to go the EBAY route, for the same money you’ll get yourself a 6800, but you have to be slightly careful of which version you get, and also these are power hungry, so you may need to think about your power supply too.
I’ve seen plenty of horror stories about the Leadtek ones, to the extent that I would not recommend one.
Don’t bother with the Geforce 6800LE versions, they have a reduced number of pipeline - sometimes they can be activated but for the extra cof maybe $40 you can get the real thing anyway, and you will not miss the money 12 months from now anyway.
The Geforce 6800 GT versions are good, better yet are the Ultra versions, you will pay for the latter though, Asus do a sort of halfway version, its really a GT card with selected GPUs and faser memory the V9999, not bad but they only have 128m memory and nowadays the standard at this level of card is 256m.
The Geforce 7800 range of cards is quite new, they are not massively better than the 6800 so I can’t see much reason to shell out for one, unless you have an application that really needs on, there are not too many second hand ones around, so you’ll have to buy one new.
I have read that the XFX cards are the ones that are best to go for.
All I know about the ATi cards is that they use less power, no doubt they do some very nice ones but I haven’t had any of their recent offerings.
The power supply I got 2 years ago was far beefier than I needed at the time – 450w – and it’d run most of the cards I’ve seen just fine.
Trouble is, I still have Windows 2000, and an AGP motherboard. Most of the ATi cards require Windows XP.
So now I can either upgrade my software, my motherboard, my CPU, throw another half a gig of memory into it, and then get a PCIe video card, or just bag it and save my pennies to buy a new computer next year when this one finally can’t keep up. Let’s see… $700 to upgrade practically everything in the case except the hard drive and CD-rom, or… not, and buy a new computer next year.
If, and a big if, I can find a video card that’ll run on AGP with Windows 2000 and it’s enough of a step up over my 9800 Pro, maybe.
Hmm. Thanks for the input. 
Funnily enough, I used to have exactly the same card. I’ve now got an AGP nVidia 7800GS and it’s very good. I know I’ll be upgrading next year to a PCI Express system, but it won’t be £200 down the pan as it will be my secondary PC.
I gave considerable thought to buying a new system now, but decided not to. Firstly, the requirements for Vista are not known and I intend getting a higher end system; secondly, current video cards and monitors may have issues with HDCP; thirdly, prices will be cheaper.
We just bought the nVidia GeForce 6600 for our “slow” computer. It was most definitely a big step up from our previous card for this computer.
Unfortunately, we ended up having to buy a new power source for the computer as well. We bought the new power source, hooked everything up, and we’re still getting a message stating the video card isn’t receiving enough power. I don’t know why, as we bought a power source that provides more power than the card needs.
We must have hooked something up incorrectly.
So, I guess, what I’m trying to say is be sure your power source can support whatever graphics card you play.
Our “fast” computer is running the nVidia 6800 GT graphics card. It provides beautiful graphics and we’ve never had a lick of problem with it.
My 6600 came with a spot on card to plug it directly into the power supply instead of it trying to suck all the power it needs through the AGP slot. I got the same message before I hooked it into the power supply. You might want to try doing that if you haven’t already.
According to my husband we do have plugged directly into the power supply. So, that can’t be the issue, I guess. I dunno, I’m not a hardware whiz at all.
I don’t know then. I know I’m only running a 380W PS and it’s handling the graphics card, sound card, four hard drives, a couple other cards, and the motherboard and processor itself just fine.
Thanks anyway, I’m sure we’ll figure out where we went wrong eventually. For whatever it’s worth, we’re running a 400W PS with two hard drives, graphics card, sound car, motherboard and processor.