For Christmas this year I was given a gift card for Future Shop (Canadian version of Best Buy) and I have decided to upgrade my video card. I am replacing a GeForce 9800 GT. It has been an excellent video card and it has served me well but it’s older and I know these things don’t last forever, especially when abused regularly.
Today I brought home a GeForce GT 240. It has some improvements over the 9800 (GDDR5 instead of 3, 1GB instead of 512MB) but all in all it does not blow the 9800 out of the water like I was hoping. The guy at Future Shop said it was somewhere between mid-range to top of the line and I had a feeling he was blowing smoke up my butt but the price was reasonable so I thought I would give it a try.
Benchmarks in Windows are exactly the same: 6.8 (Win7 Pro)
GTA 4 runs fairly smoothly with higher details than before.
Saints Row 2 is a little choppy but again the details are set high. The game looks glorious. I did engage in a little civilian kill frenzy followed by a battle with the police. Fighting is smooth and the explosions are nice. Again, how much of this is due to going from “balanced” to “quality” in the driver settings is a mystery to me.
GPU-Z tells me this new card is inferior in a few ways:
Fewer transistors
Fewer shaders (96 instead of 112)
Pixel fillrate of 4.4GPixels/sec instead of the previous 9.6
Texture fillrate of 17.6 GTexels/sec instead of the previous 33.7
Memory bandwidth of 54.4 GB/sec instead of the previous 57.6
The GPU, memory and shader clocks are all lower on the newer card.
So I am pretty sure this video card doesn’t measure up pound for pound with the old one although the gigabyte of GDDR5 is a great equalizer. But in any case, I want to try something else. The other option there was a Radeon 5750, which was about $100 more. I know $$ does not always equal quality.
I’m wary because the last time I tried Radeon products (which I had been faithful to previously) I was burned badly. The Radeon I bought was an absolute piece of crap (something in their 2400HD line IIRC- I don’t remember specifics because I couldn’t get rid of it fast enough). It was much slower and much less capable than the card it was supposed to be replacing. There was no point in benchmarking it- I could just tell it was nowhere near as good. So now I have it in my head that AMD/ATI will intentionally sell a hobbled card. But Nvidia doesn’t seem to be above doing the same. So the Radeon looks like the best card Future Shop offers.
I am going to research further to see if the 5750 is worth the extra $100 but I wanted to ask the Dopers if they have any experiences with this card and if it’s a worthier use of my gift card than this GeForce GT 240.
The GT240 is not a good replacement for a 9800GT, as it’s slower. I don’t think you can buy them new anymore, the card in the shop was probably old stock. Here is a very negative review:
Radeon do indeed make good cards these days. However, a 5750 isn’t much faster than a 9800GT, so may not make a very worthwhile upgrade. Depending on how much this gift card is worth, you may be better off looking online for a better deal. Or you could just keep the 9800GT (which has had a long life because it’s a decent card).
Don’t worry about a past bad experience with the old radeons. ATI (the company that made them) was bought out by AMD, and they have since been much improved.
What messes people up in general is understanding the model numbering system that video card manufacturers use. For ATI/AMD/Radeon, first number is usually meaningless. The 2nd number usually tells you the chip technology, and the third number tells you the clock speed setting. (My info is a few years old, try to find a new guide that tells you what the numbers mean.) Therefore, a 5750 is inferior to a 5830, which in turn is inferior to a 4870.
If you are looking for the best card, there most reliable indicator I know is price. Higher prices nearly always mean better cards. I usually look at pricewatch.com to determine which cards are the best.
Of course, this leaves you in a catch-22: you want a good card, but you want to spend as little as possible for it. Sorry, good video cards never, ever come cheap.
In the last couple years, the prices of the higher-end cards have come right down, while those mid-range have hardly changed. I got an ATI 4870 (bit faster than a 9800GT, but similar ballpark) for £100. To get the same performance now would still cost me about the same, which is why the 9800GT isn’t an easy card to replace. On the other hand, there are really good deals on the Nvidia GTX 460 and ATI 58xx cards.
I gotta admit, I love my Radeon 4870–in my typical usage patterns, it even beats out a nVidia 295GTX (which is not, really, all that plausible, so I might have got a bad 295)
The 2000 series Radeons were dogs, admittedly, but everything since then has been amazing for me.
I’ve used a lot of Radeons at work. They’ve been around with various chips for over 10 years. For business use they are reasonably priced and do a great job. I’ve always bought duel head cards because all our staff runs duel monitors.
For business use, we’re not concerned with blinding speed. Heck, all it has to do is display Office and our in house Oracle software package.
This isn’t accurate. The first number is very meaningful. It represents the generation of card, which can have huge implications. Graphics cards makers come out with a new revamped designed every 6-12 months, and then they turn that into a series of cards (from high end dual-GPU models to low end integrated stuff) at various price points. Occasionally there’s a mid-generation revamp with some modest improvements.
But the Radeon 5 series, for example, is DX11 compatable, much more energy efficient than the 4 series, and has various improvements over the 4 series. A 5 series of the same model (5870 vs 4870, say) is a pretty significant improvement.
The second number does indicate how high or low end the card is. This affects stuff like how much memory it has, how many unified stream processors, and stuff like that. The third number is usually a smaller tweak on those numbers - the xx50 series tends to be a xx70 series where one of the banks of stream processors failed and is disabled.
No single number tells the whole story. A 5450 will have the advantages of the 5 series (better power efficiency/heat generation, directX 11, etc) but it’s a low end card without much horsepower, so a 4870 would be better overall even though it lacked those features. At a closer comparison it gets trickier, but I’d rather have a 5750/5770 than a 4870 now. The 4870 has slightly more horsepower, but the new feature support of the latter cards is important.
Anyway… to the OP, the 240 was basically meant as a cheaper replacement for the 9800, so you shouldn’t have expected to see performance improvements. You should really look into getting a DX11 card. Anything short of that isn’t going to be enough of an improvement over your 9800 to justify buying something new. I would strongly recommend bumping up to the $170 type price range and getting either a GTX 460 or a Radeon 6850. They will be a pretty substantial upgrade. Otherwise just stick with the 9800.
But generally there’s nothing to worry about with the ATI cards. They dominated the market for almost a year there, and NVIDIA has only recently caught up. Despite this, they kept their prices on their whole lines very reasonable. I got a 5850 a while back and I haven’t had any problems with it, works great.
FWIW, I just went through the new video card thing, replacing an 8800GT. My research found the 460GTX 768MB card to be the best bang for the buck but it wouldn’t work with my 400 watt power supply. Rather than replacing the PSU, I went with a 450GTS, which was the most powerful card I found that didn’t require more power than I have.
It turned out my screen artifacts weren’t being caused by the graphics card. I also ended up with a nice new monitor.
Another catch 22: today’s video cards, even though they are 2X better than last year’s, will perform half as well by next year because the software (usually games) became 4X more advanced.
Imho, every year, if you compare the best $200 and $400 video cards against last year’s best $200 and $400 video cards, you’ll end up with the same relative performance.
Therefore: even though today’s $100 video card was top of the line just 12-18 months ago, today it’s just as outdated and slow as the $100 video card 12-18 months ago.
It’s not so much that they sell hobbled cards as they each put out about half a dozen variations of their cards with incremental differences. This is mostly for the sake of manufacturers looking for different purchases or pricing points. For an end user, you want to be sure to check with a site that ranks all the cards individually.
That list from Tom’s Hardware which Alka Seltzer posted is a good guide, both for their final ranking and also to give you and idea of what each card goes for, approximately.
Tom’s singles out the 5770 as one of their favorite choices for around $130(US).
If you’re looking for testimonials, I’m currently using a Radeon 4850 and it such an awesome card that I’ve been reluctant to upgrade it. Even though it’s only dx10, I’m sticking with it because I’ve had such great experience that I just don’t feel any need to change so far. It’s handled everything I’ve thrown at it like a champ while I’ve seen dx11 cards stumble, for example, with Civ 5. I bought this card about 2.5 years ago and it was money extremely well spent.
The one hesitation I have about recommending one is that they tend to be enormous. If the 240 fit, the 5770 probably will too, but be sure to double check the dimensions. My 4850 only barely fits in my case if I move one of my hard drives to a bottom bay.
I’m sure I will upgrade, but when I do it’s going to be another Radeon, absolutely.
I’ve had good luck with both NVidia and Raydeon cards, once they are installed.
But I kick myself every time I buy a Raydeon card, because the installation is always a major pain in the butt.
Upgrading NVidia cards is a snap. Old one out, new one in, download the new driver. Done.
My Raytheon installations always take much longs, with generous helpings of swearing involved. Each time, I promise myself I’ll never do that again. Then several video cards later, my greed for the newest on-sale shiny shiny overcomes my past agony, and I go through it all over again.
(raise my right hand) I do hereby swear that I will never again go through that.
Good thing the internet isn’t binding.
Side-note: Anyone else mourning the passing of BFG Video cards?
Well I have returned the GT240 and have not bought anything to replace it yet. I think I’m going to wait a while and go much higher end. Fortunately, I can use my gift card on Future Shop’s website which has a better variety of video cards than the brick and mortar stores.
Don’t buy a video card from Future Shop, even if you have a gift card.
I had two 8800s die within a week of each other and it’s been a bitch dealing with evga to get them replaced. The first one (or second, I dunno) came back and has been fine but the other one died within a week. I’m spending so much shipping broken cards across the continent that I should’ve just got a [del]580GTX[/del] 768mb 460 GTX or something.
Palooka, if I can find a video card online that is $75 less than what Future Shop offers I will certainly keep your advice in mind. I have ordered from TigerDirect before and was generally happy with them except that I was under the mistaken impression that they had a warehouse in Vancouver which they do not. Thus, the item I thought would arrive in a few days actually arrived in a few weeks. It was almost funny watching it on the shipping tracker heading backwards (Ohio or thereabouts to Toronto) before finally heading my way. Almost.
Future Shop lists the recommended 5770 for $230. If I were going to buy a video card, I’d buy it from the best vendor in Canada – NCIX – which lists the XFX version (best warranty) of card for $145. It’s an $85 dollar difference! If you choose next day delivery, you’re down to a $75 dollar difference. That’s not even including the $20 MIR, since those are sketchy.
The 2400 HD was indeed a piece of crap. But I wouldn’t let that scare you off - almost everything from Team Red since the introduction of the 4800 series has been excellent.
For the record, your new card is actually WORSE than your old one.
