Graphics card upgrade -some issues

[Beirut]

Can you nail down your budget and tell us what the rest of your hardware is?

It will help to see what card might be best for you.

[71-hour Ahmed]

Sorry guys. OK more info:

Budget is probably on the order of up to £150-200 tops for a graphics card, plus whatever I'd need for a power supply if I need a new one.

Existing PC get-up:

Pentium D, 3.2 Ghz.
2 Gb RAM
Windows XP Home
1 16x PCI Express slot on motherboard (for the graphic card). Currently where the 7500 SE is located.

Hope this is enough to make a suggestion based on.

[Slug For A Butt]

You could do with whipping out your PSU and checking the wattage and what it delivers on 12v. It will be on a sticker somewhere on your PSU.


Personally, if I had to buy a new PSU and graphics card on that budget, I'd probably be looking at an Nvidia 7900. I believe there aren't many performance differences between that and the 8600, it's just that 8600 is DX10 ready. But by the time that will be an issue in most games, the 8600 will be out of date anyway, as will the 7900. I think you can just get more bang for buck with the 7900.

http://www.cclonline.com/product-inf...r_id=0&tid=n/a



If you already have a good quality PSU and you want to go for broke, you could buy an 8800 for that money, but unless you are thinking of upgrading you PC in the next year or so I think it will be money wasted.

http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/125114/rb/0

As you can probably tell, I'm a believer in not spending to much cash on a DX10 graphics card until it is needed, by then DX10 graphics cards will much cheaper (and probably better). Thats why I'm not spending a big chunk of money yet. My 7600 does just fine for now, and when DX10 is an issue I'll probably splash out then. I'd save that £120 in a safe place until you really need it for R2TW hopefully.