What Graphic card ?????

[Crispy]

Hi Folks
I think I need to replace my card, FX5200 128, had it for 1 year. It seems to be slowing down on refreshing pages etc, and getting long in the tooth.
I dont play `intensive games` so I don`t need a `uber`Flash hyper mega ding dong card, just a regular workhorse type of card. ( plus, I have very little cash!!!!).
Can anyone recommend a suitable product, at a reasonable price.

[oralpain]

That card should refresh pages and do all normal work just as well as any other card.

Maybe your system needs a good clean out and up date more than a new video card.

[Crispy]

I have given my machine a good talking to, virus, adaware,clean up, defrag, polished/vaccumned fans, kicking, updated drivers etc....... didn`t seem to help much.
The main sympton seems to be: I `autohide` the taskbar, and when i move the pointer to the bottom of the screen to reveal the taskbar, it pops up ok, but the left hand icons are blanked for a few seconds before they appear. Plus menus seem to have a longer delay before they appear.
The machine has an athlon 64 3000+ with 1 gig mem. ?????????????

[Dark Horse]

That doesn't sound like a graphics problem, in 2d it is more or less just told what to display by windows and it only shows what windows gives it.

You could just not hide the task bar?

What kind of budget are you thinking for an upgrade? If you don't play games you could get something for well under £50 that would be more than up to it, if not £100 would be about right for a decent gaming graphics card.

[maverick77_uk]

Hiya,

Definately NOT a graphics card problem. Try one or all of the following:

1) Defrag your hard drive (which you've done)

2) Ensure you haven't got loads of pointless programs running in the background clogging up resources

3) Ensure drivers are up to date and working OK without any conflicts

You definately don't need to change your hardware. You've got some sort of software problem - I would have said teh fragged hard-drive, but as you've defragged that, my next guess would be loads of pointless resource hugging proggies in the background.

See ya!

[Crispy]

folks, thanks for all your replys. It seems that some recently added programs/processes were causing the slowdown. I have gone through the startups (via msconfig) and weeded out the chaff etc. Hey presto back to ok`ish again. Taskbar apps refreshing correctly now...
Although I still would like to upgrade the fx5200, so any other rec`s would be appreciated. I cannot get my head around the heirarchy of all the different models of nvidia/ati, can anyone put them in some sort of order, worst to best/oldest to newest etc,or is this asking to much, and is this an extraordinarilly long sentence...............?

[nvening]

You say you dont have much cash, how much? And i guess your AGP?

[Dark Horse]

This should help, I know 3dmark 2005 isn't ideal but its most available test.



Couldn't find an 05 test of older cards but there is some overlap on the 3dmark03 graph.

[nvening]

As much as i like toms hardware guide, er?

[Dark Horse]

Although I still would like to upgrade the fx5200, so any other rec`s would be appreciated. I cannot get my head around the heirarchy of all the different models of nvidia/ati, can anyone put them in some sort of order, worst to best/oldest to newest etc,or is this asking to much, and is this an extraordinarilly long sentence...............?

So he can see how things rate performance wise without having to type a massive sentance!

[cptwhite_uk]

maybe it's a bloated registry - in which case the best solution is to reformat i'm afriad - it's about 3 hours work if you know what you're doing.

[Wiczy]

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/vid...005-17gpu.html <-- That's a decent, up to date comparison