I'm planning on upgrading my 3 year old pc (Evesham 2600si with 2.6ghz pentium 4, 1 gm RAM, 256 mb radeon 9600, 120gb hard drive, MSI 865pe neo 2 g motherboard). I've already doubled the ram from 512mb to 1gb and i'm looking to get a new graphics card. Problem is I just can't decide what to get. I have an agp slot so that immediately limits my options, and I don't want to spend more than about £120 so all of the new Nvidia cards are out of my reach. I'm seriously considering either a Radeon x850 pro or an x1600 pro. The x850 sounds a lot more powerful but it doesn't support pixel shader 3.0 or HDR. Are these actually necassary nowadays? I'm also not sure about cooling. I've been used to a passively cooled heatsink so I don't want anything too noisy. I quite like the look of the large fans that exhaust air out the back. Do these make much difference or are the ordinary fans ok? I'm also not sure about which company to buy from. Connect 3d seem good but I don;t like the look of the fan on the x1600, gecube are cool but their x1600 doesn't have a vga slot, HIS have good fans but I only really want to buy from www.lowestonweb.com or amazon (as I trust them) and neither of these stock them, sapphire look alright...So many decisions...![]()
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