any recomendations for a graphics card?

[H2O Forester]

i am trying to find a new graphics card that is the best one for games any suggestions?

[H2O.viper]

http://www.digitalstormonline.com/images/video1.png

[H2O Forester]

K thanks i'll look at it.

[Stument]

http://www.digitalstormonline.com/images/video1.png

Im pretty sure that image is out of date?

Cant see the ATI 4870 on there.. or the new Nvidia GTX290 cards

If it was me id be going for either the ATI 4870 or the Nvidia GTX290, The 4870 is pretty cheap for what it can peform but the GTX290 is pretty pricey.

[Archer]

hubby says 4870 is current best value for money, but if thats not a problem get a 4870x2

[H2O sobe]

Stument the GTX 290 is not yet even finalized to my knowledge. It will be showcased at Nvision, but aside from that, not out yet.

If you want a good budget gaming rig but giving hella kickass performance, grab 2x 4850s for CrossFire. I will say this though... if you decide to go AMD/ATi, be prepared for poor support and driver support. ATi is known very well for this. For the price of an 4870, Id honestly rather purchase a GeForce 9800GX2 for about the same price.... The performance tends to be better in the majority of games. And its a dual gpu solution, so will have an easier time rendering on one gpu and have the other gpu calculate physics. Running physics from an SLi setup or single gpu setup is ignorant when you can just grab 2 cards, not run them in SLi/XFire and have one simply do physics work and the other just render. Yay for stockpiling older vid cards to do the work.

[H2O Forester]

ok thanks for the help

[Maxman]

Please do let us know about the motherboard's specifications first; most importantly the running Chipset... Whether the instant board contains PCI Express or PCI Express 2 slots on it? Whether you're intending / prefer to run your liesure suits on SLI or on Crossfire mechanism?

[H2O Forester]

hmm well i have no idea what the is but i'll check it out thanks for the reminder.

[Buck-O]

Also what kind of budget are you looking at? How much money you want to spend on the card can help narrow down which one to look at.


And as Maxman said...motherboard info is important as well.

[H2O 1MPUR1TY]

I currently have a 9800GTX+ from XFX and I love it.....

and BTW make sure your power supply has the right connectors (6 pin, 8 pin, 2x 6pin, etc.) and that your MOBO has the right slots (PCI-Ex16, PCI-E 2.0, (hopefully not AGP)

[Buck-O]

I currently have a 9800GTX+ from XFX and I love it.....

and BTW make sure your power supply has the right connectors (6 pin, 8 pin, 2x 6pin, etc.) and that your MOBO has the right slots (PCI-Ex16, PCI-E 2.0, (hopefully not AGP)

Slight addition here...

It is not a requirement that your power supply has the PCI Express power connectors. Most all video cards will come with adapter to convert from two 4pin Molex connectors to a PCIe connector.
What is a requirement, is that you have a powersupply with enough balls to actually get the job done. If your power supplt is to weak, you will get really bad instability, and possibly even crashes in your games.

If your mother board is an older spec, and only has a PCIe 1.0 slot, that runs at 8x, your card will still work. It will not be running at its speed potential, but it will still perform properly. PCIe 2.0 is a fairly new revision, and is backwards compatible with PCIe 1.0. FOr example i have a g92 8800 GT 512 in my old nForce 4 SLI board. Which is a PCIe 16x slot,l but PCIe 1.0 spec. The card runs perfectly fine in that board. And my proc isnt fast enough that i would even notice any of the minimal bottlenecking that would happen from not being PCIe 2.0 compliant.

Hope that removes any possible confusion.

[LadyVix]

I agree that knowing your system specs is the first thing we need to know before making suggestions. More than just motherboard though, we also need to know the CPU you're running to make sure to avoid any bottlenecks. Running a high end card with an old P4 isn't going to get you anywhere.

As far as power supplies are concerned, ALWAYS go for quality over wattage. About a year ago I fried my backup system (motherboard/CPU/RAM/video card) by using a cheapo Rosewill 650w that spike my system before it died. The $50 I saved on the PSU cost me $700 in fried components.

[Vandalous]

As already stated, we will need the following to give you an educated opinion:
- current system specs (including power supply, if known)
- budget
- games played or want to play
- manufacturer preference, if any

[Viatrophy]

Slight addition here...

What is a requirement, is that you have a powersupply with enough balls to actually get the job done. If your power supplt is to weak, you will get really bad instability, and possibly even crashes in your games.

.

I found that out the hard way, installed a 9800GTX+ and it fried the power supply, oh it was thrilling...

Like others have said, we really need to know what sort of budget your looking at before we can really suggest cards (and the specs of your current computer.)

[Nivekk]

If you want a good budget gaming rig but giving hella kickass performance, grab 2x 4850s for CrossFire.

I'm gonna go ahead and second this sentiment. I really think that for the money, you really can't beat this combo. Two 4850's are going to outperform most of anything in the price range, especially when considering the newer GTX cards from Nividia.