Thoughts on Upgrade of Sapphrie 1950XT

[DPOverLord]

Long story short, my little brother needs a new graphics card so I am giving him my 1950XT. This leaves me with no card so I am looking for a good upgrade in the 150-200 range.

It seems the NVIDIA 260 or the ATI 4870 are my best choices. The only issue is that the 4870 1gB are 219 and the NVIDIA 260's are the same price. Then if I want to hit below the 200$ mark its only the Nvidia 260 (with 192 cores)

What are your thoughts?

 

[SlowSpyder]

You can get a 4870 512MB for less then $200 too. Depending on what resolution you play at that could be a very good option worth looking at too. Your 1950XT had 256MB according to your sig, assuming you got by on that a 512MB 4870 might be more then enough to make you happy.

 

[Leyawiin]

The MSI GTX 260 is $199.99 without a rebate and there is a $20 rebate on it this month (you'll have to shop around to find the form - Newegg doesn't link it). $179.99 is a great price for such a good card.

 

[SlowSpyder]

If you want to look a step below the GTX260/Radeon 4870 you might want to look into a Radeon 4850/GeForce 9800 series card. You could probably get those with 512-1GB of memory on the lower end of your price range, and either of those would be a huge upgrade over your 1950XT.

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

4870

 

[Denithor]

4850 in the $130 range or GTX 260 in the $180 range are your best bets.

The 4870 1GB outruns the GTX 260 in most games & matches/beats the GTX 280 in many so it's a great value (4870 was hamstrung with only 512MB).

These days you don't want to dip much below 1GB of VRAM unless you're really on a very limited budget. Today's games at higher resolutions really eat up the frame buffer.