My ATI HD3870 is taking a shit, so I need something new. Nvidia or ATI, I don't care. PCI-E x16 slot.

Asus M3A mobo, 2GB RAM, AMD Phenom 9500 quad core processor, 500w PSU, WinXP home. Nothing fancy there as you can see.

~ €100 should get me a decent card I guess. Preferably 2 DVI ports.

I mainly do LFS and some SolidWorks on this PC. No high-def gaming or whatever. I kind of lost track with all the GT/GTX/GTS etc. that's out there.

What say you?

Seeing that it's for light work, I'll still go for a descent card like AMD radeon 5750,5770 or if it's from NVIDIA then 550ti is in that price point(no clue as to how much green ones cost in your place). Those should be good enough for anything heck even heavy gaming. You can look for lower ones too like 5450 or gtx 4XX series ones; there are a lot of options to choose from so look wisely.

I'll have a look around in the 5770 series. Is that also the best card ~€100 will buy?

HD 5770 (and HD 5750) is still a great card for its value.
I recommended it.

Keep in mind that it would be end of life soon. If you gonna buy it, do it now

Quote from anik360 :

You can look for lower ones too like 5450 or gtx 4XX series ones; there are a lot of options to choose from so look wisely.

HD 5450 is weaker than HD 3870 ;-)

i know you said €100 but this ( http://www.overclockers.co.uk/ ... atid=1914&subcat=1830 ) could be a nice little purchase.
this ( http://www.overclockers.co.uk/ ... &catid=56&subcat= ) could also be a nice buy. i'm not an ati user but it's at a similar price. we just need an ati user to say if the card i linked is better than the nvidia i also linked.

I actually got an HD5750 for now. I need it this week and I can pick this one up tomorrow. When finance allows, I'll have a look for some hardware upgrades.

Thanks for the suggestions.

Quote from dadge :

i know you said €100 but this ( http://www.overclockers.co.uk/ ... atid=1914&subcat=1830 ) could be a nice little purchase.
this ( http://www.overclockers.co.uk/ ... &catid=56&subcat= ) could also be a nice buy. i'm not an ati user but it's at a similar price. we just need an ati user to say if the card i linked is better than the nvidia i also linked.

Nice cards both. This ATI is faster, but maybe at some nvidia games the GTX 460 is a bit faster

Quote from vourliotis :

Nice cards both. This ATI is faster, but maybe at some nvidia games the GTX 460 is a bit faster

Yep, for example in Mafia 2 or Just Cause 2. And, at high settings, it's WAY more faster.

I'd recommend you to wait for the AMD HD6790, to see in what price range will that come.

And i'm pretty sure your cpu will be a bottleneck.

Quote from bmwe30m3 :

I'd recommend you to wait for the AMD HD6790, to see in what price range will that come.

And i'm pretty sure your cpu will be a bottleneck.

AMD's Radeon 6790: Coming up short at $150 USD

Just get a GTX590 or HD6990.

Quote from bmwe30m3 :

I'd recommend you to wait for the AMD HD6790, to see in what price range will that come.

And i'm pretty sure your cpu will be a bottleneck.

i don't think his quad core cpu would be much of a bottleneck.
i have a phenom 550 (duel core) with the GTX470. all my games remain at a very high fps. GTA IV, i have everything on ultra or max and it copes fine. same for Arma2 and that's a system hog. mafia2 runs good too. and i'm still running DDR2 ram.

small question (i don't mean to hijack the thread), now that usb3 is beginning to establish itself. is usb3 quick enough for us (the user) to start seeing usb3 graphics adapters?

Nope.

USB 3.0 = 5 gbit/s (really - around 2-3 gbit/s, depending on mobo) while PCIe 2.0 16x = 64 gbit/s and PCIe 3.0 16x = 128 gbit/s.

Quote from dadge :

small question (i don't mean to hijack the thread), now that usb3 is beginning to establish itself. is usb3 quick enough for us (the user) to start seeing usb3 graphics adapters?

PCI-E 3.0 16x: 16GB/s (current cards are probably only using about a quarter to half that)

USB 3.0: 400MB/s (i.e. 0.4GB/s)

PCI-E 2.0 1x: 500MB/s (i.e. 0.5GB/s) (this is that little tiny slot)

Granted, there are some cheap video cards that run on PCIE 1x.

Quote from dadge :

small question (i don't mean to hijack the thread), now that usb3 is beginning to establish itself. is usb3 quick enough for us (the user) to start seeing usb3 graphics adapters?

Hijack by all means . I've got a decent card for now.

Quote from Forbin :

PCI-E 3.0 16x: 16GB/s (current cards are probably only using about a quarter to half that)

USB 3.0: 400MB/s (i.e. 0.4GB/s)

PCI-E 2.0 1x: 500MB/s (i.e. 0.5GB/s) (this is that little tiny slot)

Granted, there are some cheap video cards that run on PCIE 1x.

i was serious dude lol. would it be fast enough for physics? i've seen usb2 monitors that use your cpu and ram to create a virtual gpu. that's what got me to thinking that maybe usb3 would now be fast enough to have a usb3 gpu.

"USB monitors" are 2D only, and are unrelated to GPUs. They also have either a) low refresh rate or b) low quality due to Useless Serial Bus being only ~240 mbit/s.

no worries. i was just thinking out loud. thanks for the input though.

I just picked up a Power Color HD 5770 the other day, and I was quite surprised at it's performance for what I paid ($125 Canadian)

This one only has 1 DVI port though, and a VGA and HDMI port as well, so no tripple screen for me (not that I'd want to on this card)

As far as performance, as I said I was impressed, for what I payed I expected budget performance. I'm running Crysis 2 perfectly fine at native resolution, even with my old Quad core Q6600 and DDR2 800 ram. I've even maxed out the settings in a few games I didn't think I would be able too.

Though maybe I'm just not expecting as much because my previous card was so slow

Some Fantastic refreshes of the 58xx series here.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/ ... duct.php?prodid=GX-258-SP

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/ ... duct.php?prodid=GX-259-SP

I'm going to hijack this thread a bit (looks like it's done now anyway). My graphics card went kaput today (on painful onboard graphics now). I have similar requirements to the OP, except due to financial constraints I'm looking at the sub-£50 range. Basically...

• PCI-E 16x
  
• ~£50 (56 euros)
  
• ATI or Nvidia
  

Oh, DX10 would be nice... Frankly I just need something cheap to get me off these on-board graphics (can barely even run Windows), but I don't know enough about graphics cards to make an informed choice.

Any help welcome!

You can have my gts250 for £45, if i can find a replacement.

Quote from DarkTimes :

I'm going to hijack this thread a bit (looks like it's done now anyway). My graphics card went kaput today (on painful onboard graphics now). I have similar requirements to the OP, except due to financial constraints I'm looking at the sub-£50 range. Basically...

• PCI-E 16x
  
• ~£50 (56 euros)
  
• ATI or Nvidia
  

Oh, DX10 would be nice... Frankly I just need something cheap to get me off these on-board graphics (can barely even run Windows), but I don't know enough about graphics cards to make an informed choice.

Any help welcome!

Radeon 6570

OK, thanks for the tips and the offer. I have a friend who can do me a HD 4670 for £20, which seems ideal. So Imma gonna go with that then.

I got the HD 4670 plumbed in today, working great. Was looking at the retail price for them and you can pick one up for about £40. Seems a pretty reasonable card for that price, although I'm obviously not an expert.