video card?

Question

I have a great computer with 2.5g of good ram, a good hard drive, an amd64 processor, and a shot video card. Whats out there that would give me good performance under load, and keep up with my ram preferably without breaking my bank account??

thanks

Answer 1

If you are looking for a solid video card without breaking the bank I would seriously be looking at the Radeon 3850.

It costs about $179 so not cheap, but not super expensive either. More importantly it is the best bang for the $$$'s. It outperforms the 8600gts and is way above the 8600gt from Nvidia. It is in the same league as the 8800gt at resolutions up to 1280x1024 (or higher if you get 512mb ram).

Second choice would be the 8600gt which you should be able to find in the $100 range. It will have about 1/2 the power (or less) than the Radeon 3850 and is the low end of acceptable for a gaming card.

I have an 8500gt myself and just tried Crysis on it last night....Had to put everything on LOW settings at 1024x768 to get it to run at a halfway decent framerate and it still got choppy. Sure old games run fine on the ati 2600 or nvidia 8500 but if you want something that is forward looking those aren't it.

Another plus of the Radeon 3850 is that it has DX 10.1 and can run in PCI express 2.0 so it can stick around a little longer before becoming obsolete.

Answer 2

The NVidia 7900GT or the 8600GT will play any games today with ease and it won't break your bank account. I bought my 7900GT last year and it runs all the newest games today with no problems. I think you can get it now for under $150, but only online.

The 8600GT is a good card for less than $150 on Newegg.com that support DirectX 10 for future games next year. Either way, you won't get the latest and greatest performance unless you dish out $300-400 for the 8800GTS video card.