Video Cards

**Lemur** · 04-15-2011, 18:12

Hi Hosa, to the best of my knowledge the only reason to go with two cards right now would be if you had a ginromous monitor or a multi-monitor system (such as Beirut and his flight sim shrine). Pretty sure any medium-to-high-end card can handle modern A-list games on most monitors.

Four gigs should be plenty of memory for modern games. By the time you need to bump that you will also need to bump your processor, so I wouldn't worry overmuch. However, Vista Home Premium is not nearly as much fun as Windows 7. Since you're on Vista, you can go with an "upgrade" license, which can be had for $115 at Newegg. There are probably even better deals around, and since you are a state employee you may be eligible for even steeper discounts. Definitely want to go with the 64-bit version, to address all of your RAM.

As for videocard, I kinda fall into the AMD crowd right now, since I have no real use for GPU compute support, and the power/heat savings are real. Any of these would rock out TW:S2 with ease. Frankly, they might be overkill, since S2 is supposedly more CPU-bound than GPU-bound.

Thoughts?

**Hosakawa Tito** · 04-16-2011, 13:38

I'm kinda leaning toward the Radeon HD 6870 & Win 7. Thank you for the advice, gentlemen. Now to shop price.

**naut** · 04-16-2011, 16:53

As Lemur mentioned AMD cards are more power efficient, potentially reducing your electricity bill compared to with an nVidia card. Something to consider.