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Thread: What is the best PCI-E GPU to get these days?

  1. #1
    ATX Mental Case
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    Default What is the best PCI-E GPU to get these days?

    I am starting this topic to find out what Graphics Card I should get. I am currently running a 3.2Ghz Pentium 4 with 512MB of DDR333 memory but with a 128 GeForce FX5200 on AGP. So although I have a great CPU and Memory I have to run my games on lowest graphics settings. My MoBo has both an AGP slot and a PCI-E x 16 slot so I thought that my next GPU would be PCI-E x16.

    I am writing to establish what the best Graphics Card is on a normal budget. Not limited but not greater than the annual spending of a 1st world country. Any tips would be great.

    (Just checking, a GPU is a Graphics Processing Unit aka a Graphics Card right?)
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  2. #2
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    Hey man,
    I would suggest prolly an Nvidia card for PCI-E at the moment. The only reason (because at heart im a die hard ATI fan) but they have their whole SLI dual card potential. And if your kinda on a budget... atleast like me... well anyways i dont like to spend more than 200 on a part, i might be alitlte cheep but there is isnt much to choose from with vid cards. It seems its either 200 or 500 lol. I would suggest a 6600GT or something, The high end GPU is the 6800 ultra i think. As for the brand i couldnt advise on, like i said ATI user .

    Also you might want to think about getting another stick of memory, more and more you need a gig of ram to run things smoothly. I dont know if you notice, but on my computer i get decent frame rates but the sceeen will jump occationally. Almost like a missed frame... Anyways this is caused by a lack of memory. So an upgrade like that might not be a bad purchase either, and ram doesnt really go out of style so it might not be a good idea.

    About the GPU, just remember that genrally GPU reflects a video cards chipset. (i.e. Radeon 9800 Pro, 6600 GT, etc..) Where as if you were just to ask what type of video card would prolly spawn more brand specific responses.
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    Default Thanks

    Thanks for the help. I will look into buying some new memory (I will have to go DDR2 this time). I think that my Graphics card is what really needs updating but if memory makes a difference I will buy some and flog off my old. I have a ECS 915-A MoBo which has both an AGP and PCI-E port and DDR and DDR2. However I can only use DDR or DDR2 at once so I would have to buy brand new DDR2 sticks and sell off my old DDR sticks. But thanks for the advice.
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    Your right about needing a new vid card, that sounds like your bottle neck at this point. If and when you get your ram dont forger out dual channel, thats nice stuff.
    "It's time to prove to your friends that you're worth a damn. Sometimes that means dying, sometimes it means killing a whole lot of people."

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    Quote Originally Posted by Chapel
    Your right about needing a new vid card, that sounds like your bottle neck at this point. If and when you get your ram dont forger out dual channel, thats nice stuff.
    I have been looking at the Dual DDR2 memory. Is this the kind of stuff you are talking about? ebuyer. It is a bit steep for me to pay now but I would probably be able to afford it once I have sold off my old 512MB DDR. Would you say that £127 is a good price for 1GB of RAM?
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    For the GPU, the 6600gt is a good choice for budget, or for the high end either the X850 XT P.E. or the or the 512mb 6800 ultra if u can wait for it too come out.

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    that ram is not a bad price. though it is value ram. I dont know how you feel about it, but your cas timings on that ram were kinda high 4-4-4-12. You want to shoot for something with a low cas timing. Now i would explain how cas timings work, but i cant remember. but i do know that lower is better. You could prolly find some stuff thats better for not much more money. But unless your really into preformace you proly wont notice it.
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    While I do not know much about CAS latency (I have read a basic explanation) I do know that for DDR1 memory you should be looking at 2.5-2-3-5. However with DDR2 memory it is said that the first figure, although higher than DDR1 (which means it requires more clock cycles), is still faster. I can write an explanation of latency if there is any interest in the topic. I will also look up the differences in the latency of DDR1 and 2 later today and post my findings. Perhaps I will then post some of my findings in the Memory section of these forums. Thanks for all the help with the memory side of things.
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    punk as **** public_eyesore's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by jonopaul01
    My MoBo has both an AGP slot and a PCI-E x 16 slot so I thought that my next GPU would be PCI-E x16.
    What motherboard is that? Ive been looking for a soket 478 with agp and pci-e so i dont have to save up for a mobo and a vidoe card at the same time.

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    I would like to point out straight away that I am afraid that this will be useless for you as it takes a LGA775 socket so it will not work for you. The Motherboard is an ECS 915p. I stumbled across this company when I was looking for a new motherboard to fit my LGA775 P4 3.2. I still have a useless AGP Graphics card but at sometime in the future I wanted a PCI-E graphics card (which is why we are all here). My last CPU I destroyed (wasn't my fault, well actually it was totally my fault) So I went with a new top of the line one. As to the motherboard, I have very little to complain about. One problem that I faced was that it is not suited towards hardrives with ATA belts. It only has support for one hardrive if it is on a belt. If you have SATA Hardrive however it is really great. I bought a SATA Hardrive and it is really fast to write (although not really the fastest thing out there). I have not tested out the PCI-E slot so I can't comment about that. One issue (if a minor one) is that it is very hard to install the case soundjacks onto the motherboard, once it is installed. Also, although I haven't tested this, I believe that you can only run either DDR2 memory or DDR1 memory. You cannot run a combination of both on the motherboard. This means that you only effectively have 2 "cartridges" (can't remember the right word now) to stick your memory in. This is annoying for me as if I wan't to get DDR2 memory I will have to sell off my old DDR memory (see above). I think that is about it. I haven't had any real problems since instalation of the motherboard (Although when I did install I got thoroughly confused as to why it was not working, had to call up my frieand all the way in South Africa for troubleshooting before he asked me "Have you plugged in your auxillary power cable" which of course I hadn't. Perhaps I will stick this review in the motherboard section when I have tried out DDR2 and the PCI-E socket.
    Last edited by jonopaul01; 03-19-2005 at 05:08 AM.
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