Video Cards

[Hosakawa Tito]

Looks like my video cards are kaput. STW2 has been playing fine for me, till last evening. Soon as the game entered the battle screen it crashed to black and gave me a display driver error. I tried updating the drivers, no joy with the updated drivers either, none of my games will play. The card is old, NVIDIA GeForce 9800GT so I guess I'm due dammit. My system:

Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q9650 @ 3.00GHz
Memory: 4GB DDR2 800MHz
Motherboard: ASUSTeK P5N-D
Hard Drive: 500GB ST350062 0AS SCSI
Operating System: Windows Vista Home Premium

I've been considering 3 video cards. Dual 1GB GTX460, Dual 1GB Radeon HD6870, Dual 1GB HD 6950. Anyone have any experience with these cards? Any recommendations?

[Papewaio]

Well my PC died about 6 weeks ago. So yesterday evening I got all the parts together for a budget box (based on the Ars Technica budget one). Put it altogether last night, installed Win 7 on it. The video card is the relatively cheap radeon 6850. I've seen a few issues with nvidia listed here... But I was using one until recently. I'll get shogun 2 on it and see how it runs. All the graphics cards you listed are more powerful then that so I'll be showing the minimal experience

[Lemur]

Hosa-san, you specify "dual" for each of your cards. May I ask the reason? I've always been a proponent of one good card, rather than going the two-card route, if only for reasons of game support and driver support. I would be interested to hear your rationale for going with two. Mebbe it's time for me to change my tune?

[Hosakawa Tito]

Hehehe, if I had taken your advice last time, I would've had better vid cards than the 9800GT. I bought this gaming system 2 years ago from Alienware, and it came with this NVIDIA SLI dual card system. From what I've read using dual cards increases performance and enables one to play these graphically intensive games at higher settings.

Should I go with the single card and increase my memory to 8GB of DDR3? I don't know much about building pc systems and appreciate any advice ya'll can give.

[Lemur]

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]

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

[Furunculus]

Looks like my video cards are kaput. STW2 has been playing fine for me, till last evening. Soon as the game entered the battle screen it crashed to black and gave me a display driver error. I tried updating the drivers, no joy with the updated drivers either, none of my games will play. The card is old, NVIDIA GeForce 9800GT so I guess I'm due dammit. My system:

Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q9650 @ 3.00GHz
Memory: 4GB DDR2 800MHz
Motherboard: ASUSTeK P5N-D
Hard Drive: 500GB ST350062 0AS SCSI
Operating System: Windows Vista Home Premium

I've been considering 3 video cards. Dual 1GB GTX460, Dual 1GB Radeon HD6870, Dual 1GB HD 6950. Anyone have any experience with these cards? Any recommendations?

i wouldn't go dual unless you are buying high-end cards, as SLI/cross-fire performance is always subject to the quality of driver/patch enhancements to achieve increased framerate.

I'd look at one 6970.