Best card for P4 550 3.4

[compunerd]

As the title says any suggestions for a P4 550? I want the best possible card but im not sure if the ATI X850 PE or the new Geforce cards will run to there max potential with the CPU. As theres no point spending all that money on a card that needs a bigger processor. o yer and i have 1024 DDR2 ram. Cheers

[shaithis]

GeForce 6600 or 6800GT would be my recomendation

[krazy_olie]

A faster card is a faster card, some games won't be bottlenecked by the cpu at all, some will. Surprisingly games with flashy graphics are usually less cpu intensive due to a lot of the work being done by the gfx card, same goes for multiplayer, no AI etc.

Pretty much anything will bottleneck a 7800gtx on some games, though on those games the framerates would probably be high enough that it doesn't matter.

So a direct answer to the title then a 7800gtx would be theoretically be the best card, though probably would not be the best investment. 6800GT is probably a good one to go for, £200 on scan. (AGP versions are cheaper, infact there's an ultra going for £210 on novatech or something like that).

One of the limiting factors of a "slower cpu" is the fact that it will decrease SLI performance.

[compunerd]

Thanks for your help. I havnt bought the 550 yet, in light of what you are saying i might just buy an AMD 3800 or 4000. My computer usage is:

65% internet and downloading.
30% Gaming.
5% Microsoft office applications.

I thought that the P4 might be better for the downloading and the internet but i realy need a good graphics system as Flight simulater is very demanding. I figured that the P4 might be more stable with flight sim than the AMD as it is developed from microsoft and it did use to crash alot with my previous AMD, so i went off them slightly.