Given the other components, which vard should I get?

[weegie.geek]

I have:

Q6600. G0 but at stock right now. I realise this will bottleneck most newer cards, even with overclocking. I'm happy to overclock it to get more performance.
ASRock P45TS
4GB DDR2 - Considering swapping it out to another box and putting in 8GB DDR3 instead...
620w Antec Neo Eco PSU

We game at 1600x900.

Typical games: Skyrim, Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, Saint's Row 4.

The box had a 5770 until a few weeks ago, which was doing the job. It's now doing that thing that a lot of them seem to do sooner or later, where if you try to do any 3D accelerated stuff it'll crash to desktop and restart the driver. Multiple driver versions have been tried and the box is completely stable with an old 8500GT I had lying around. It's obviously not of any use for gaming these days.

Obviously this being an old S775 box, and the relatively low res it's running, there's no point throwing a really powerful card in there. We don't plan on upgrading anything else in the box apart from maybe the RAM, so the ability to transfer the card to a new build in the near future isn't a concern. We want good performance, but in all honesty maxing out the settings on games isn't that big of a deal.

Given a budget of up to ~£100 for the video card, what would get me the most bang for my buck, bearing in mind the parts it'll be paired with? I'm architecture-agnostic, so ATI or Nvidia doesn't matter at all. Brand-wise, I'd prefer to support a manufacturer without contempt for their customers. I guess that rules out XFX...

What would you recommend?

edit: Vard? Oh ffs.

[weegie.geek]

Nobody?

I'm leaning towards a 2GB 7850 at the moment...

[chuckskull]

You won't do much better than that without going second hand TBH. A GTX 660 is another option, but it's almost identical performance and another £20 or so. Honestly I'd chose the one that comes with the games you prefer.

[Bonebreaker777]

You won't do much better than that without going second hand TBH. A GTX 660 is another option, but it's almost identical performance and another £20 or so. Honestly I'd chose the one that comes with the games you prefer.

Seconding that. Personally I vote for AMD but it't your call in the end. You can always sell your AMD game voucher, lowering the overall cost of your card even further.

[c12038]

Hi there

Just spotted your post airing on the cautious side i would go for this http://www.scan.co.uk/products/2gb-m...s-896-dvi-hdmi rather than the 7850 which could probably cause problems.......

Just my opinion read some reviews beforehand

[scaryjim]

... rather than the 7850 which could probably cause problems.......

Why on earth would a 7850 cause problems?

An OCed Q6600 should actually still give you a reasonable gaming platform (I've just moved my step-son on to a stock Q6600 and a 4850 and he's pretty happy with it ), particularly in newer games which finally use more than 2 threads. Get a decent aftermarket cooler on there and see how high it'll go IIRC Core 2 Quads benefit most from a very high FSB, so don't be scared to turn the processor multi down if it gives you more room to breathe on the FSB

Is your 4GB made up from 2x 2GB sticks of at least DDR2-6400 standard? If so I wouldn't bother messing with the memory, you won't see any significant benefit. Even if you managed to get your FSB to 1600MHz stable, dual channel DDR2-6400 could still (theoretically) saturate it. Save your money for better things (unless you desperately need the extra memory in the other box, that is). If you do swap it out, don't bother with anything other than the absolute cheapest set of DDR3 memory you can find: you're simply not going to benefit from spending more. And consider 4GB instead of 8GB: I struggle to tell the difference between my various machines, regardless of the processor and memory configurations (I've only got 8GB in my main box because I got it on a ridiculously good deal).

A 7750 is roughly the same performance - perhaps just a little higher - than your old 5770, so anything from there upwards should give you a bit of a performance bump. I personally see no reason to avoid a 7850 is you can get one at a decent price. Ebuyer also had a Sapphire 7870 very cheap a couple of weeks ago, could be worth a look (that'd eb a card worth carrying over into a new build in the future, after all).

[weegie.geek]

Ended up getting a GTX 470 from CEX. I had some store credit I'd probably never use otherwise, and it comes with a year's warranty.

Not as powerful as some cards I could've gone for, but it's a decent increase over the 5770, and if it breaks within the year's warranty, I can just return it to the shop 15 minutes away.