Ok... I'm really really new to the whole Graphics card stuff and i'm looking for somethng pretty low end. basically i have the option of a 64Mb 8x or a 128 4x and I just need to know which would serve me better. Its not going to be a gaming machine. It might run some audio style things from Winamp or MMJB but nothing major. Same price for both of them... whatcha reckon? Also i need a top end one for another machine... any favourites kicking around for under £400?
Man 400GDB or whatever your european dollars are is a lot to spend on a gfx card... You can spend around 200-250 or so of your currency and get a 9800PRO which is the 2nd or so best card you can get, only things above it is the 5950Ultra, the 9800XT is better, but for twice the price it isn't worth it. You can get a little AGP 8X nvidia geforce FX 5200 64MB for like 50USD, which is around 40 your currency.. I think You could also get a geforce FX 5200 128MB for about 60-70USD.. Although I'm not sure if things are harder/more expensive in europe Overall; USA = Best place to buy computer hardware on this planet.. Because even in canada, it's hard to find good cheap things.. Especially since newegg and such places don't ship up there :x Poor canadians. BTW - Wtf is the acronym for your currency? IE USD = United States Dollar...
im pretty sure that many far eastern countries have even more stupidly priced hardware than the states £ = GBP (Great Britain Pounds) if you wont be playing any games on the low end machine (or just some older games, like over a year old) then a 32MB GeForce2MX would be fine, which costs peanuts, any graphics card made within the last 4 years can do 2D just fine, it is when 3D games get involved that newer cards are better for the top end one you can either spend less than £200 on a 9800pro or 5900 or spend nearly £400 on a 9800XT or 5950Ultra, spending around £200 makes much more sense as it offers almost all of the performance of the £400 option
the 2 cards are both about 35GBP. The thing that i'm finding the most confusing is the whole 4/8x bit is it worth getting a 64Mb card that runs at 8x rather than a 128Mb card that runs at 4x? Geez i'm confused!
you won't see any difference between the 2 cards unless you are playing games, and then probably won't even see much difference i'd say go for the 128MB card, as i *think* double the memory would give the better performance increase than 4x->8x agp edit: im assuming that the 2 cards you are referring to are the same, with the only difference being the memory and agp speed
Got to agree with Josh here the 128mb @ 4x will be better than the 64mb @ 8x. To be honest for £400 you can pretty much buy any card under the sun. Ati's 9800xts or NVidia's 5950 (or softmod a 5900).
Well there's a whole lot more to it than that. If it's too confusing just ask someone that knows what they're talking about to recommend something. The 4X/8X agp speed doesn't say much about performance yet. 8X says that the card is usually less than a year old. So not much information there, nor in the 64meg/128 meg part. it's the rest of the specs that count . You could get a 64meg 9600 or fx5600 series card that would beat the pants off a 128 meg gf3 ti200, gf4mx440 or fx5200, radeon 9100 radeon 9200, radeon 8500le etc. There are a lot of cards that boast a lot of memory and look attrative to people who don't know what they're looking at, and at the same time there are ones that don't boast huge amounts of memory but still haul a**. There have been 128 meg cards on the market for a long time. The first ones were gf3's/radeon 8500's. That's was years ago. Compare those to todays medium/high end radeon 9800pro's and you've got a humongous difference. If you have 400£ to just spend on a card i'd say go for something like 9600XT if you don't really care that much about performance, fx5900XT if you don't want to go too mainstream, 9800PRO if you want great overall performance, 9800XT if you want bragging rights. And if you want nVidia, go with the fx 5700's 5900's or 5950's, depending on how much performance you want out of your system and what features you're looking for. So i'm basically telling you to buy whatever you want, but avoid the low end cards, seeing as you have money for some good hardware anyway, and go with whatever you can afford/still suits your purposes. You may want to ask someone who knows about these things to tell you what suit your purposes.
if your going for cheap and good preformance i hafta reccomend a radeon 9100 even in spite of my great hatred of all things ATI. I picked mine up for $30 and it preforms almost as good as my geforce4 ti4200. It has pixel shaders and is just plain insanely price effective.
Need more information; it depends on the cores of the chips. The amount of RAM is really not as important as what core the chip is.
If you want a cheap card for a multgimedia rig, maybe you could obtain an older card free or for next to nothing from a friend building a new rig, or upgrading there own computer. That way you get to blow the majority of your money on a killer card . I would say anything around a gefroce2mx would be sufficient! Top thre cards right now are : 9800XT 9800Pro 5950U I would say if your looking for top end performance, without giving a damn about how much you spend, 9800XT, 9800pro isnt far off, but if you arent comfortable with ati cards, get eh 5950U.
even the top cards arent really using much over the limit of 4x at the moment (if they even get that far).
Dat`s right. The 4x ports ain`t restricting bandwidth. 8x ain`t nuthin` exept lower voltage. Go for tha one with 128MB
Yeah but the 128 meg one isn't necessarily any faster. Why don't you tell us the exact specs and prices of those cards... If it's choosing between say a sluggish 128 meg fx5200 and 64meg fx4200, obviously he should go for the ti4200 if they were the same price...
The older 64mb 4200's were (in quite a few tests) better than the 128mb version because they used faster ram, so that may also be a consideration... But the make of card would be good, a 64mb geforce 3 is a LOT faster than a 128mb MX 440..... 8* is probably not gonna give much of a boost (despite a m8 insisting his 8* 4200 is much faster than my 4*... )
