Graphics Cards

[Dumbledore lives]

For Christmas my parents offered to buy me a new graphics/ video card or whatever, and I'm not sure what to get. I'd like this computer to be decent for gaming, and though it can run most games from the past couple years they have to be on low settings.

My current stats are
Windows Vista Home Premium
Dual Core 2.33 GHz
3 GB Ram
ATI Radeon HD 2400 Pro

I've heard the NVidia has some decent ones but I'm still not sure of specifics. THe price should be somewhere between 100 and 200 US dollars.

[Aedilred]

The world of graphics cards seems to have moved on since I last bought one (two years ago) and it's very easy to spend lots of money on a card which will be worth tuppence hapenny in a year's time. That said, if you've budgeted for it, I'd always recommend getting the most powerful card you can. I have a Nvidia 8800 which has never let me down, although it does struggle to run some ultra-modern games on the highest settings. My previous card was a Radeon against which I'm rather biased because it was underpowered, but the Nvidia seems rather better in any case.

One thing to bear in mind- although it's pretty inevitable really- is that many older games won't operate properly, or at all, on some modern graphics cards. I know this was a problem with the 8800s in particular; if you have any games that are more than three or four years old that you still like to play it might be worth checking to see if there are any cards that cause problems for them (of course, Vista will probably cause problems for them anyway).

If you can stretch to it (and if the motherboard supports it) I'd suggest trying to upgrade to 4GB of RAM too. 3GB always seems a bit of a cop-out for me on a modern machine. It's no use having an amazing graphics card if you can't muster enough RAM.

[Don Julio Anejo]

You can buy an ATI HD 4890 for less than $200 (and 4870 for a bit less). For about 250-280+ you can get an HD 5850 which should last you for at least 2.5 or so years. Also, check your PSU. I wouldn't recommend neither the ATI 4800 series _or_ the nVidia 260+ or higher if it's less than 550 Watts.

An upgrade to 4GB is probably not worth it since I'm guessing this was a prebuilt brand name computer (like an HP or a Dell), which means it's a 32-bit OS (which can only support a tiny bit more than 3GB). And in any case, having 2GB of ram is more than enough for games these days.

As for older games - that's mostly an nVidia problem at this point in time since they keep coming out with new drivers every month that never seem to work the way they should.

but the Nvidia seems rather better in any case.

Not really, no, not since ATI came out with their 4800 series last year (or well, last-last year now), which beat similarly priced nVidia cards by a large margin and it's the same story with the 5800 series.

[Zincorium]

The three main concerns you have are:

Motherboard.

Power supply.

How big your case is.

Seriously, your CPU and RAM configuration is awesome if we're troubleshooting for you, but for graphics cards, we can't make much of a recommendation without knowing what your rig will support.

Key thing to look for here is the next-to-newest generation card that isn't at the very bottom. Midrange to slightly lower is the best value, but the bottom of the lineup are gimped badly enough that it's not worth the price difference.

If, and ONLY if, you have PCI-Express, I'd recommend getting a Radeon 4890. It's just under $200, so it may still be out of the price range you're looking at, but it blows anything NVidia offers in that price range out of the park. A Radeon 4850 drops that down to $100, and while a video card that's even lower would still be better than what you have, it's not enough to really matter.

I'm an NVidia fanboy, but until they offer the new 100 series to DIY'ers, I don't think they're offering much that's worthwhile. I've got a 295 with watercooling, and I can't justify replacing it unless some new game comes out that can't be run otherwise.

[MethosH]

The real question is... How much money do you want to expend?

I'm pretty happy with my GForce 9800 GTX+, I can play anything with it, but if you really wanna go into the future just go for the newest nVidea graphic card