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Basically i need an upgrade as my current card is a pile of poop.

I`m looking at spending anyware inbetween £100-£200, can anybody on dakka help? Im no computer whiz and have no idea what is actually good on a graphics card....


p.s. i figured this should go in this forum as you know, i use the graphics card to play games....

p.p.s ill probably pop up in a while asking how to fit the darn thing.

Hey EagleArk! I'm using a ''ASUS GeForce GTX 660'' in my computer. I think it's a pretty good card, but depending what games you have, you may need a more powerfull one.

A Radeon 7850 would be in your budget as well. That's what I upgraded to about 3 weeks ago. I'm pretty annoyed as I've noticed it's dropped £50 in price since I ordered mine. Grrrr.*

Be aware that you may also need to upgrade your power supply depending on what wattage the card is.

*Just remembered I ordered a psu at the same time, so it hasn't dropped in price

Lethaos wrote:
Hey EagleArk! I'm using a ''ASUS GeForce GTX 660'' in my computer. I think it's a pretty good card, but depending what games you have, you may need a more powerfull one.

Agreed, GF GTX660 is a good buy.
I don't know how exactly it looks in your country price-wise, but you could also look at Radeon HD 7850 or 7870 if you prefer ATI to NVidia.

And if you need more power an nVidia GTX 660Ti could just be inside your budget.

 Macok wrote:

Lethaos wrote:
Hey EagleArk! I'm using a ''ASUS GeForce GTX 660'' in my computer. I think it's a pretty good card, but depending what games you have, you may need a more powerfull one.

Agreed, GF GTX660 is a good buy.
I don't know how exactly it looks in your country price-wise, but you could also look at Radeon HD 7850 or 7870 if you prefer ATI to NVidia.

Whats the difference between ATI and NVidia?

ATI = Free games - slightly more processing grunt and generally a higher memory bandwith.
Nvidia = Free credit in F2P games - more refined drivers and cards generally - physx supported trough the card instead of relying on the cpu
TBH their is not really that much of a difference - some engines work best on one card while other work better on another. At the moment Nvidia has better SLI drivers so if you are thinking of upgrading and getting a second card in the future that may be the way to go.
However AMD claim they will have sorted there issues by the end of next month but we will see...

ATI cards also generally have lower power consumption than Nvidia cards.

Yeah, my new ATI card is quite a bit better than my old NVidia card was, and yet it takes up about the same level of power.

 LordofHats wrote:
ATI cards also generally have lower power consumption than Nvidia cards.

I am not sure if that is true. It's certainly not true if you compare the nVidia GTX 660, GTX 660Ti and the ATI 7850, cf tomshardware.com-gpu-chart.
The 3D Mark11 performance and power consumption under load of the GTX 660 and 7850 is comparable: around 6500 points in a performance setting and 127W vs 131W. The idle, i.e. Windows desktop, power consumption is much lower on the nVidia with 7W vs 15W though. The GTX 660Ti on the other hand burns 140W under load and 13W idle while delivering 8000-9000 points in 3D Mark11 (same settings as above). Therefore its performance vs power ratio is much better (if you need the extra power that is).

There are more charts on the above site for different games, e.g. BF3 and Crysis2 where the above nVidia cards perform much better (less than 60 fps vs 80-90 fps in BF3 with high quality full HD and 40-50 fps vs 53-60 fps in Crysis2). In games using a similar engine as Metro3 the situation reverses somewhat: 66 fps vs 60-70 fps. The large variations are due to different overclock settings on the different brands of graphic cards.

It's probably best if you look through those charts and find games you (would) like to play and then compare price and perhaps power consumption / noise.

Man reading this thread i'm glad my eyefinity card from a few years ago had held up so well, seems like tech has slowed down quite a bit.

Without knowing what your other system specs are i cant recommend a Good Card.

Most importantly what Power supply are you running.

What Motherboard are you running (different GPU's work better on different chipsets)

What CPU are you running. (if its not fast enough you will bottleneck the Newer cards, meaning they wont perform as fast as they should)

 cerbrus2 wrote:
Without knowing what your other system specs are i cant recommend a Good Card.

Most importantly what Power supply are you running.

What Motherboard are you running (different GPU's work better on different chipsets)

What CPU are you running. (if its not fast enough you will bottleneck the Newer cards, meaning they wont perform as fast as they should)

Listen to this guy. He knows his stuff.

You should see how he overclocks.

If i said Intel H61 would that have anything to do with chipset? As for power suppli have no idea, is there any way to check?

Edit: And CPU is processor right? Its an i5 2500k.

My current system is:
And 960t zosma quad core.
16gigs DDR3-1600
Intel 520 sad 160gig
2x radeon 6870
MSI 990fxa

I have the two GPUs for crossfire but I leave one disabled pretty much all the time as it is sort of over kill. I run Sky rim on near max settings and get very smooth fps. The CPU can be unlocked into a hex core but again its overkill so I usually don't bother. At max power this all runs on a raid ax 750w psu and is very stable. By max I mean max over clock on both GPUs with the zosma unlocked and over clocked to 4.0ghz. I'm sure it could go higher but again its massive overkill.

In the budget you are looking at, I would recommend the Nvidia GTX 660 which will cost you around £150. The reviews I have read seem to suggest this is the best value card around at the moment, and it is powerful enough to produce decent frame rates on modern games at max settings, provided your processor will handle it. http://www.scan.co.uk/products/2gb-evga-gtx-660-28nm-pcie-30-(x16)-6008mhz-gddr5-gpu-993mhz-boost-1059mhz-cores-960-dp-2x-dl-dvi-hd

As for checking what PSU you have, if you take the side off your PC case, the PSU is the large box, usualy silver or black that is situated at the back of the PC, with the power cable connected to the back of it. It should have it's power rating printed on the side.

And, in terms of what chipset you're running, if it's an i5 2500k, that's Sandybridge, probably socket 1155.