Graphic Cards

[alexcarrington@]

Does anyone know a good value graphics card.

I've heard that just coz a card has large ram doesn't mean it's faster, it's more down to processing speed?

I have a GeForce 32mb 2mx at moment and was thinking about going upto 128 ram.

Any ideas

[DeludedGuy]

Yeh, I currently have a 9600XT, they are going cheap now and give a decent performance. You can find some for as little at £60. Or you could get a 9600 Pro, almost the same performance, and cheaper.

[GreenPiggy]

all depends on your budget. My advice would be to get a 9800Pro off for sale, someone is bound to have one

[Ravens Nest]

Larger amounts of ram allow you to increase the resolution a game runs at and also allows for larger textures to loaded into the videocard rather than having them have to be loaded into the Videocard continually from your hard drive which can cause stuttering.

A move from a 32MB card to a 128MB card would be just right for most of the latest games i.e 90% of them

The only games that do use more than 128MB are Doom 3 & Call of Duty (on extra settings) perhaps some others as well.

As you have said processing power i.e. Graphics processing power is much more important as the faster a videocard can move information the less you will notice the stuttering.

A good value videocard that will last a while would be a 9800 pro, you can get them for £119.99 from lowest on the web
http://www.lowestonweb.com/Products/...3-2A672531F699

The best videocard deal i have seen on this very forum is for the 9700 pro you can get it for £70.50p! from retek (15-20% slower than a 9800 pro though)
http://www.retekdirect.co.uk/acatalog/Video_Cards.html

Here's a benchmark of loads of videocards including the 9700 and 9800, so you can get an idea of performance.
http://graphics.tomshardware.com/gra...004/index.html

[scrappy]

www.retekdirect.co.uk also are doing 3D Prophet 9700 pro for only £60. The ATI card and the 3D Prophet card are just the same except one is built by ATI.

[alexander]

If you hang around on the forums, I picked a 9800 Pro Sapphire up for £70 including postage..

[Wam7]

By far the best bet is to get a 9800pro. If I wanted a relatively low cost card I wouldn't bother with anything else. It will run most things very well and only start to be slightly out of it's depth with the most demanding games (read Doom3, Far Cry) in 1280x1024 at max detail and 4x 16AF.