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Newbie needs some video card recommendations ...

M

meisenzahl

Junior Member
Building a new PC (actually, a friend is doing it for me
ange.gif
) and I've been out of the hardware loop for a while. Currently have a 6+ year old ATI Radeon w/ 128MB of RAM, a dinosaur in today's terms.
biggrin.gif


What are decent cards in the $75-$100 range or so? I would like to be able to play some games, but don't need the over the top super expensive cards. The machine will be either a Pentium Dual Core or Core 2 Duo.

Advice appreciated, thanks!

Chris
 
Last edited:
A new 4670 or perhaps a used / good deal 9600GT / 9800GTX, something in that range.

Welcome to AT. What's with the COLOR=blue ! important link? Hah.
 
meisenzahl said:
Building a new PC (actually, a friend is doing it for me
ange.gif
) and I've been out of the hardware loop for a while. Currently have a 6+ year old ATI Radeon w/ 128MB of RAM, a dinosaur in today's terms.
biggrin.gif


What are decent cards in the $75-$100 range or so? I would like to be able to play some games, but don't need the over the top super expensive cards. The machine will be either a Pentium Dual Core or Core 2 Duo.

Advice appreciated, thanks!

Chris
Click to expand...

GT 240 128-bit DDR5 512 Mb (These are power efficient 40nm GPUs that newegg has on sale for $95).
 
frozentundra123456 said:
GT 240 is a good low to mid range card, but overpriced. I would go for either a HD4670 which is cheaper and only slightly less powerful, or go with a HD4850 or 9800GT/GT250.
Click to expand...

If GT9600 has 64 stream processors and is faster than HD4670 wouldn't GT240 with 96 stream processors be a lot faster than HD4670?

I haven't seen the benchmarks on GT240 but I was guessing it would be somewhere around HD4770 in strength.
 
What power supply are you running? I know for a fact that the 512 mb 4670 will run fine on a Dell 300W PSU. If you are considering a higher powered card, you will almost certainly need a new power supply with the 6 pin pci-e power connector. The 4670 doesn't require any additional power connector, it draws all its' power from the PCI-16x slot.
And if you do need to upgrade your PSU, that decent video card for less than $50 after rebate looks pretty nice.
 
GT 240 with GDDR5 is not too bad a card but not a very good value at $100. GTS 250 is a lot more card for like $10 more - much better value. Or one of the 4670 cards for $50AR etc would also be a great deal.
 
Computer Bottleneck said:
If GT9600 has 64 stream processors and is faster than HD4670 wouldn't GT240 with 96 stream processors be a lot faster than HD4670?

I haven't seen the benchmarks on GT240 but I was guessing it would be somewhere around HD4770 in strength.
Click to expand...


I made a mistake in the original post about the GT240 vs the HD4670. I was thinking of a comparison of the GT240 to the 9600GT, in which those 2 cards are almost equal.

Since one card is ATI and one is nVidia, I don't think you can compare the number of shaders directly. I dont know what you mean by "a lot" faster, but according to a recent review on Tom's hardware, the GT240 vs the HD4670 is about 25 percent faster. However, they were testing an overclocked DDR5 GT240 vs the 4670, so the results could be skewed slightly. Anyway, I still think the GT240 is overpriced at the moment, although I am glad to see another decent card that does not require an external power connector. I don't think the GT240 is really competitive with the 4770, although the 4770 does require external power.
 
frozentundra123456 said:
I made a mistake in the original post about the GT240 vs the HD4670. I was thinking of a comparison of the GT240 to the 9600GT, in which those 2 cards are almost equal.

Since one card is ATI and one is nVidia, I don't think you can compare the number of shaders directly. I dont know what you mean by "a lot" faster, but according to a recent review on Tom's hardware, the GT240 vs the HD4670 is about 25 percent faster. However, they were testing an overclocked DDR5 GT240 vs the 4670, so the results could be skewed slightly. Anyway, I still think the GT240 is overpriced at the moment, although I am glad to see another decent card that does not require an external power connector. I don't think the GT240 is really competitive with the 4770, although the 4770 does require external power.
Click to expand...

Overall the rankings go as follows...

HD4670
9600GT/GT240
9800GT
HD4770
 
meisenzahl said:
Building a new PC (actually, a friend is doing it for me
ange.gif
) and I've been out of the hardware loop for a while. Currently have a 6+ year old ATI Radeon w/ 128MB of RAM, a dinosaur in today's terms.
biggrin.gif


What are decent cards in the $75-$100 range or so? I would like to be able to play some games, but don't need the over the top super expensive cards. The machine will be either a Pentium Dual Core or Core 2 Duo.

Advice appreciated, thanks!

Chris
Click to expand...

Just out of curiosity, is your mind made up on the cpu? I ask because since you are clearly looking for an entry-level machine, AMD is actually a better value in the low end...
 
If your looking for a good budget card. You could go with a HD4670 which don't need the external power connector. On newegg you can get one for around $60 dollars after rebate.

I'm running a HD4670 1GB version. Which I wanted a good budget video card for my system. So far I'm really happy that I bought it. I'm able to play all my games at high graphic settings. 🙂
 
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