What sub £120 graphics card should i go for. iam thinkin summet along the lines of 6600gt. any toughts also i want AGP nto PCIE
If you can strech to 150 then get a 6800 GS. otherwise, an X800 GTO is good, or even a GTO2 if you can find one. Mankz
PCI-Express X800GTOs are excellent value for money inside that budget. If you stretch a little, you could try to acquire the HIS version which has a great heatsink to facilitate better overclocking.
It largely depends upon how much importance you place on SM3.0, the X800 cards lack this latest feature but tend to pack in more power for your pound. As a rough guide the X800GT = X1600XT = 6600GT. It's well worth plunking down the extra cash for the 6800GS, that offers some reallly sweet perf for the money. If you need something inbetween those then the 6800std and X800GTO are worth a look with the X800 often being slightly faster but again lacking SM3.0. The 6800std core speed is slightly lower than the 6600GT but the memory bandwidth is much higher allowing the core the freedom to fulfill its potential and hence outperform the 6600GT, it bodes well for core o/c'ing too! If you can 6800GS is the way to go and can be had for £140. Do bear in mind these modern cards are pretty noisy so you may want to factor in a 3rd party cooler (eg £15 Arctic Cooling VGA Silencer).
(HIS IceQ BTW). Fitting your own cooler is straight forward, the Arctic Cooling VGA Silencer is cheap, quiet and effective. Be sure to check the other posts in the gfx forum for loads of relevant and great info. At £120 the 6600GT is the most popular card with other pretty equal choices being X800GT & X1600XT. At these sort of speeds 256MB just about begins to be useful too. If you can nab a 6800 (no suffix) all the better as the big increase in memory bandwidth really helps. The 6800GS is the sweetest card IMHO and well worth the extra £30 over a 6600GT. Alternatives are X800GTO and X800XL which fit in either side of the 6800GS perf-wise. However the X800 cards don't support SM3.0 which isn't major but could hurt them down the line. The X1000 series and GeForce 6/7 do support SM3.0 and this helps them to be more future-proof purchases, not that gfx cards tend to be remotely future-proof of course. SORRY, double post.
