New Graphics card recommendation on par with GeForce 9800GT

Until now I was using an Albatron Geforce 9800GT 512MB card which I bought for ~100euros back in 2009.
http://www.mwave.com.au/productarchive.asp?sku=42050318

What was good about this card is that it had a 256bit memory bus / interface and pretty much every 3D game played nice and fast on high graphics settings @1280x1024 resolution (Aliens VS Predator 3, Rage, Command & Conquer 3 & 4, Duke Nukem Forever, Black Mesa Half Life Mod, HL2, etc...)

How ever it got toasted the other day, so I now I want to buy a new graphics card of at least equivalent performance and similar price range to play the upcoming Doom 3 BFG and some of the upcoming games. (Preferably nvidia as their drivers are better)

I checked the current nvidia cards, but noticed that all the cards of that price even though they have better & faster GPUs and more & better video RAM (DDR5 / 1GB/2GB), their memory bus / interface goes only up to 128bit or 192bit the most, which I imagine will bottleneck these cards.

Also I noticed that none of the current GFX cards feature a TV-Out output to connect my old CRT TV via Scart or RCA and I don't want to have to buy a new LCD/TFT TV.

My PC specs:
Intel Core 2 Duo @2.4GHZ
4GB Ram @800MHZ
Windows 7 32Bit
19" 4:3 TFT Eizo S1931 Monitor @60HZ

My motherboard Asus P5B-E:
http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/Int...specifications

Features 1 x PCIe x16 slot to connect a GFX card on.

So which card should I get to cover my above needs?

Thanks in advance.

Hi there and welocome to the forum

What is your budget for a card and what make of PSU do you have ????

Regards
John

Hi!
I have a 1000W PSU Corsair and I can spend up to 150Euros on this card.

Get a Radeon 7850 to overcome the memory bit problem ;) Also it's the best card for the price range

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Originally Posted by retroborg

... noticed that all the cards of that price even though they have better & faster GPUs and more & better video RAM (DDR5 / 1GB/2GB), their memory bus / interface goes only up to 128bit or 192bit the most, which I imagine will bottleneck these cards. ...

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Whilst the memory buses are not as wide, most cards now use GDDR5 memory rather than the GDDR3 that your 9800GT uses. GDDR5 can transfer data at much higher speeds than GDDR3 - well over twice as fast, in fact - so you actually get more memory bandwidth, despite the apparently narrower bus (i.e. a 128bit GDDR5 card is equivalent to a 256bit GDDR3 card). It's not just about how many bits you've got, it's about how you use them ;)

The nearest current equivalent to the 9800GT is probably the AMD Radeon 6670 GDDR5 (not the GDDR3 version), which retails for around £60 in the UK, so probably around 70 euros in most of Europe. A 7850 might not quite be doable for 150 euros, as they cost around £150 and it's not a 1:1 conversion. That means you're looking at something like a Radeon 7770 or 6850 as the best card in your price range, although if you can stretch the budget a little the 7850 is significantly better than either of those cards.

On the nvidia side there aren't as many good contenders - the GTX560 (not the Ti version, which is more expensive) is probably the best card in that range, although they are meant to be releasing a GTX 650 Ti which could be worth a look.

If you just want a bit better performance and to save some money, have a look at the Radeon 7750 and the GeForce GTX 650 - they have similar performance to each other, cost < £100 (so probably around 100 euros) and would be a reasonable upgrade on your 9800GT.



One last thing: I don't think any modern graphics card will have TV out - you'll probably need to look for come kind of convertor or peripheral to do that for you - you can get VGA to TV out adpaters for a few euros. However, given a lot of cards don't have native VGA any more either, you'll be looking at stacking a number of convertors. As long as you don't mind doing that, though, you should be fine :)

Where are you located?? An HD7850 1GB might be doable with around 150 Euro but you current CPU might become a limiting factor too. I would try overclocking the CPU a bit. Do you use an E6600?? Another graphics card to consider would be an HD6870. Also is your copy of Windows 64 bit??

Thanks for the info guys!!

Yes I'm using a E6600 Intel CPU Core 2 DUO @2.4GHZ with 4MB Cache.

I'm considering in re-installing 64bit Windows 7 Ultimate to overcome the memory limit the 32bit O/S imposes, as I now have 32bit...

I will upgrade Windows 7 Ultimate to 64bit at the same time when I buy the new card, so do you think I should get a 2GB Video card instead?

So after searching through various cards, I'm considering of getting one of the following 2:

1. Gainward GTX 560 Ti 1 GB 256bit
GPU Clockspeed: 822 Mhz
Memory Clock: 2004 Mhz
Shader Clock = 1645MHz
Cuda Cores = 384
Texture Fill Rate (billion/sec) 52.5
Memory Bandwidth: 128.3 GB/s
http://www.getitnow.gr/prod/anabathm...prod1030258pp/
http://www.gainward.com/main/vgapro.php?id=455&lang=en
http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desk...specifications

2. EVGA GeForce GTX 460 FPB, 1024MB GDDR5 192bit
Free Performance Boost 823MHz Core Clock
Memory Clock = 2004 MHz (4008 MHz)
Shader Clock = 1646 MHz
Cuda Cores = 336
http://www.plaisio.gr/Computers/Hard...60-1GB-FPB.htm

Which I see is basically an overclocked version of the GTX 460 v2 1GB GDDR5
http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desk...specifications

(I'm closer to the Gainward 560ti 1GB as the price seems to be good compared to the card's specs & performance)

So what is your opinion?

By all accounts the 560 Ti was certainly a good card and as it has finally been superseeded by the 660 ti it will have come down in price. It was certainly the most common budget gaming card that I saw in use through various friends computers and they were generally happy with it.

I don't think much of the low end Nvidia cards in the new range (610-640) and would rather go with an ATI 7*** series over one of these.

Which ever card you go for, you are going to be missing your TV out port (unless you count the HDMI slot), so that may be an issue for you.

You simply have a choice, for your money, you either get a current generation ATI, or a previous generation NVidia.....

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Which ever card you go for, you are going to be missing your TV out port (unless you count the HDMI slot), so that may be an issue for you.

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Perhaps not. I might be able to get around that problem by getting a HDMI to composite video converter, to display the output from the new GTX 560ti card to my CRT TV.

As an example:
http://dx.com/p/hdmi-to-composite-s-...r-80407?item=6