Graphic artist

[sharkcellar]

I'm looking to replace the Geforce 6600 in a PC that I've been using to do After Effects work on. I know this rig is woefully ill-suited for the task but it is all that I have at the moment. The gfx card is going bad and I want to replace it. My problem is trying to sift through all of the mumbo jumbo on gfx cards. I only rarely play games (Orange box, Il-2 Sturmovik) so a lot of the benchmark blather is meaningless to me. I'm simply trying to find a card to replace my 6600, that isn't hellaciously expensive. I'm a graphic artist who uses Photoshop and After Effects primarily, though I do use 3DS Max from time to time. Any help? Thanks!


Possible graphic card purchases

GeForce 8400 GS

GeForce 8500 GT

GeForce 9400 GT

 

[brblx]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16814187035

9500gt would be notably faster than any of the above. 4650's about the same price on the ati side

 

[sharkcellar]

Brblx,

Thanks for the quick reply!

 

[AzN]

Any GPU would do for that kind of work. Get more system memory to speed up your work if you are running 64bit operating system.

 

[sharkcellar]

I'm running 32bit XP Home. I'm most concerned with making sure that the card is also compatible with my board.

 

[elconejito]

Sharkcellar, are you using Adobe CS4?

If you are, then getting a faster/higher end card will make more of a difference. This list from Adobe (http://www.adobe.com/products/aftereffects/opengl.html) says you can use pretty much anything from 7 Series and up from nvidia (and comparable ATI). Doesn't matter if it's ATI or Nvidia since it is using OpenGL, not CUDA which is exclusive to Nvidia only. [Note: if you're using some 3rd party filter that uses CUDA, that's a different story]

Regardless, even a $50-75 card like Nvidia 9600GT or ATI 4550 will probably be an improvement. The cards you listed aren't *that* much cheaper.

 

[akugami]

That motherboard should have PCI Express so pretty much any modern graphics card will go in. Considering the age of the system, I wouldn't spend more than $100 tops for an upgrade. In fact, I'd try to stay in the $50-70'ish range.

The only issue you might run into would be power requirements of some newer cards. Without knowing what power supply unit you have, you may or may not need to buy an adapter to plug into the auxiliary power port of the graphics card.