Upgrade from an hd4670 - cool, quiet, £70ish?

[cookie365]

My hd4670 is apparently too ancient to get driver updates anymore. My ssd dieing seems like the pc gods are telling me to upgrade.

I don't play games, except plants & zombies. so I just want something that runs cool and quiet and is a good allrounder. since I'll have to reinstall w7 I don't mind switching to nvidia.

can I get something like that for around £70?

thanks :-)

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I would probably get an HD7750:

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/1gb-s...ink-dvi-i-hdmi

http://www.ebuyer.com/344632-powerco...x7750-1gbd5-dh

Here is a review of the first card:

http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/graphi...vtx3d-hd-7750/

The second card is the same one,but with a different shroud. They are both single slot cards.

[scaryjim]

hd4670 still gets driver updates. What it doesn't get are performance improvements. It still gets bug fixes as and when required, through AMDs legacy driver platform (currently on 13.1 as the latest release). Download link for most recent driver: http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownloa...w-vista64.aspx

OTOH, if you just want to upgrade CAT's right, best card for ~ £70 is the 7750 by some distance. Check out the 3DMark thread: my A6-3670k is probably about the same performance level as your 4670 (perhaps slightly lower), so it will give you a good comparison to the 7750 (also my rig) further up the table. Basically you could expect approximately a doubling of performance going from a 4670 to a 7750.

OTOH, if you genuinely don't play any games beyond casual, why not get something cheaper? You can pick up a 6450 for £30: http://www.ebuyer.com/265351-sapphir...d-11190-04-20g - sure it'd be slower than the 4670 in graphically intensive games, but since you don't play any of those I doubt you'd notice the difference...

[cookie365]

Thanks both

I think I'll go for the 7750 - psycologically, because if I'm having to reinstall windows Itd be a bit depressing if the PC was slower afterwards

[wasabi]

Thanks both

I think I'll go for the 7750 - psycologically, because if I'm having to reinstall windows Itd be a bit depressing if the PC was slower afterwards

If you want it REALLY quiet stick an accelero S1 cooler on it. Mine took a bit of bending to get it to fit right, but completely silent was worth it.

[cookie365]

Thanks Wasabi. I'll see how it goes and think about the cooler later. It'll mean shifting cards about and possibly needing extensions to internal USB cables so I'll park that and see what the stock fan is like.

And my SSD seems back - perhaps it was some corrupt boot stuff, I don't know. I've updated the firmware. Need to reinstall windows anyway since it's mashed up the profile. That's the last time I put a profile on a different drive

PS - I'm a big fan of your katsu chicken yakisoba

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Thanks Wasabi. I'll see how it goes and think about the cooler later. It'll mean shifting cards about and possibly needing extensions to internal USB cables so I'll park that and see what the stock fan is like.

And my SSD seems back - perhaps it was some corrupt boot stuff, I don't know. I've updated the firmware. Need to reinstall windows anyway since it's mashed up the profile. That's the last time I put a profile on a different drive

PS - I'm a big fan of your katsu chicken yakisoba

Clone the Windows partition every so often,then you avoid having to install Windows.

[cookie365]

Yes, I cloned windows a couple of weeks ago. Problem is, whatever caused the SSD to temporarily disappear also seems to have corrupted the profile.

This time I'm going to reinstall windows but keep the profile on the same drive. It turns out it was only a few gigabytes in size so I had enough space on the SSD all the time.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Yes, I cloned windows a couple of weeks ago. Problem is, whatever caused the SSD to temporarily disappear also seems to have corrupted the profile.

This time I'm going to reinstall windows but keep the profile on the same drive. It turns out it was only a few gigabytes in size so I had enough space on the SSD all the time.

Was it on your HDD??

[scaryjim]

... my SSD seems back ... I've updated the firmware. ...

Good plan If you weren't running the latest firmware before there's a very good chance that's what caused the problems. And even if it wasn't, I'd put money on the first thing they'd ask you to do, if you rang up for an RMA, would be to update the firmware!

[cookie365]

Was it on your HDD??

Yes, the SSD is only 128Gb so I was concerned the profile would be too big so I moved it to the HDD. In the end even with Photoshop installed it was only about 7 Gb.

So I'll keep the profile on the SSD and clone the whole drive regularly.

[cookie365]

7750 arrived this morning - good work Scan

Kept the SSD with no disasters so far. And I don't think there's any need for a third party silencer. I keep having to check if the PC's actually on.