I have this motherboard, which the manual claims comes with a PCIE x16 slot for a video card.
I’ve been using the onboard video since I got it, but there are a few games I want to play and can’t. Many of them just crash on startup, and I’ve found various forum postings that indicate that the crappy little onboard chip is the reason.
My gaming is very likely to be limited to older games, so I don’t need to be able to run the latest and greatest. I’m the “buy a 4-year-old game on Steam when it’s on sale for $5” sort of PC gamer.
My TV can take either VGA or HDMI, so it needs to have at least one of those outputs.
I’m running Windows XP (everything still comes with drivers for XP, right?)
Cost is definitely a factor. Basically, I want to buy the cheapest not-total-junk video card that will get me playing Super Meat Boy and the original Portal.
I’m still running a 9800 GTX+ which still has me playing anything that’s come out recently at medium or high graphics. So, for me, that’s the baseline. It’s not the best or fastest but it still works and I haven’t found a replacement yet that I could justify vs. price.
You can get aGeForce 550 Ti for $120 which will put you slightly ahead of my baseline. Here’s the same card from a different manufacturer, also $120 after rebate.
[EDIT] Tom’s Hardware recommends the Radeon 6790 over the GeForce 550 Ti for the same price point. I don’t have a Radeon so I don’t have an argument for or against it.
Here’s a GeForce 450 which is in the same tier as mine for $110. For that, I’d pay the extra ten bucks.
I didn’t see anything much below that which I would recommend. The thing is, below a certain level stuff just gets discontinued and there’s a fast drop in “usefulness”. You go down the obsolescence curve really fast.
From what I could see, PCIe 2.0 is backward compatible with 1.0 and so either of those cards should work in your slot despite it being a 1.0 slot. I don’t know if PCIe 3.0 goes back that far so I stayed with 2.0 – there’s no PCIe 1.0 card options that would work for you. Either they’re complete junk or they are rare, discontinued cards that are way over priced due to their rarity.
I think that’s a much higher bar than I’m looking for.
Mobo manual says the x16 slot is PCIE 2.0, so that shouldn’t be a concern.
Newegg shows dozens of cards in the $30 range. Any reason I shouldn’t get one of those? Not being able to play games that came out in the last year isn’t really a concern.
Well, you do get what you pay for, and at those prices you simply don’t get very much performance beyond what’s necessary for web browsing and such. In most cases they aren’t all that much better than more recent integrated chips, so it would end up being more of a lateral move. I think if you’re going to buy new, $50-60 is probably going to be the price you need to be at to get a good upgrade right now, but it should certainly be possible to get a used card for less.
Because, really, graphics haven’t advanced all that much in the last couple years and pretty soon you’ll hit a wall playing games that are “four years old”. 2009, for instance, had Dragon Age: Origins, Fallout 3, Empire: Total War and Bioshock 2 which all recommend a GeForce 8800 or better. Batman: Arkham Asylum recommended a 7900 or higher.
Conversely, Skyrim recommends a GeForce 260, which is at the same tier as the card I recommended and only two tiers higher than the recommended specs from 2009. You can’t even buy an 8800 these days because they’re off the market (you can see them on Google shopping for $200-$300).
You can play Portal on a $35 card – I can play it on my old computer with a Radeon 3650 in it. It hangs up and lags sometimes but it can be played. You can’t play Portal 2 on it. Or Team Fortress 2. Or basically anything that was released after 2007 unless it’s an intentionally low graphic game like Minecraft or Terraria. (Before anyone says it, I know TF2 is older than that but the item updates have rendered it unplayable)
That’s just my opinion though so you’re welcome to ignore it. I just figured that a super cheap card will lead you to being frustrated very quickly when you get a game that’s been out for years and it still runs like crap.
In my case, I believe it’s not a performance issue, it’s that the on-board video drivers just suck and crash all over the place. I could run Portal fine for a few minutes. Then the whole system would lock up. I don’t generally have any other problems with my system crashing, and various forums lead me to believe that this is a common problem with the onboard chipset I have
I appreciate the suggestions. The last time I bought a video card was over 10 years ago (GeForce4 Ti 4400).
Part of the problem is that I have trouble comparing the various cards. Looks like the first number gives you the family, but the second number tells you much more about performance.
I decided to go with a Radeon HD 6670. Thanks to everyone for the info and opinions, and thanks particularly to Telperion who posted the review that recommended it.
