Hi guys and girls. I'm looking at building a new machine. At the moment I'm on socket A and AGP. I've never been that clued up on graphics cards (so many pointless different versions!!) so need a bit of help. I currently have a geforce4 ti and that does me fine. I have half life 2 installed, the new tomb raider, and a snooker game. I really don't do that much gaming so something at the same level as my current card (but in pci express form) would be fine. Reading the forums have already told me not to get the 6200 turbocache that i merrily added to my basket thinking it looked alright. Thanks in advance guys. Ned EDIT: forgot to say, I'm not a fanboy as such but have always bought nvidia, mainly due to having so much trouble with older ati cards and crappy drivers that wouldn't install when fixing other peoples machines, but I certainly wouldn't rule out ati.
A bit more than I was thinking price wise, but with the price cuts on amd at the moment who knows. How does a 7300GT compare? (primarily to the gf 4ti) am i right in thinking the GS is another one that starts using system memory? They seem to be around the £45 mark which is ok price wise. Thanks Ramble Nick
I'd try to avoid any of the turbocache-type cards, which I think you'll find on all of the newer low-end cards (x3xx basically). They may be a bit cheaper, but they rob your system memory. I think a 6600 or so would be more than enough for what you want, though I think a 7600 will be around the same price and have about twice the performance. I think any current card available should outperform what you've got by leaps and bounds, but I'd still suggest avoiding the turbocache/hypermemory cards since they do eat into your system memory. Heck, I've got a 6800GT (roughly a 7600gt performance I think, which would be about double a 7300GT which itself would probably be about double the orignial 6200 TC) sitting around on a desk somewhere that I need to get rid of at this point (I've longsince upgraded and in any case am moving) so if you're interested, I'm sure we can work something out.
Do you do a lot of downloading? (is your pc in your room?) Fans on graphics cards are usually one of the loudest fans in a pc, so if a passive model is something that you would like the 7600gs range are usually passive. If you're sticking to a £50 budget then a 6600 would be a good bet.
I had kind of decided to steer away from the turbocache models. I do have 2 gb of ram though. Do they rob it all the time or just when it needs it? As for noise, I have one of those zalman heatsinks which I can move over to a new card. It's pretty quiet.
The 7300 GT is a pretty quick card if you get one of the pre-overclocked cards with GDDR3. It's actually faster than a 7600 GS at 500/1400MHz - the faster GDDR3 cards cost around £65 though.
Thanks Tim, i am leaning towards the 7300 GT tbh. I have read that it isn't a bad card in quite a few places. You seem to be able to get one of those for £45 (not gddr3 though but I'm sure it's more than adequate for what I need!) So does the GT also employ turbocache? and if so, does it just use system memory when it really needs it? Thanks Nick
cool. It does say it has 256 mb of memory so that's what I had assumed. Cheers for your help guys Nick
