Recomend a graphics card for the following motherboard

LithiumKid1976

Hi
my pc has the following motherboard "ASUS PTGD1-LA"
im planning to pick up a graphics card shortly. is there any limit to what this can take. i was hoping to get something with between 512mb-1gb ram to run games like Half life 2,team fortress2 and newer games...

the machine is a few years old but running well.

op sys:xp
Ram .5gb
HD: 160GB

Any suggestions welcomed.
Damien

TerrorFirmer

What processor and CPU do you have?

PogMoThoin

TerrorFirmer wrote: »

What processor and CPU do you have?

Eh are they not both the same thing?

Processor and PSU i think he meant. Does that mobo have an agp or pci-e graphics card slot?

LithiumKid1976

HI
The processor is an intel Pentium4 cpu 2.93ghz.
There are 3 pci and 1 pcix slots.

Thanks
D

TerrorFirmer

Sorry, must have still been half asleep. I did mean PSU and CPU.

Your CPU is pretty old incidentally but not the worst for games like Half Life 2. Video memory has very little to do with the performance of the card, except for performance class video cards - a class you won't be buying in as the CPU isn't fast enough to utilize anything in it really. It's a common marketing ploy to kit out cheap cards with large amounts of memory to fool people into buying them - as well as the amount of memory, there are various types of memory used in video cards, ranging from DDR right through DDR5. It doesn't make much of a difference once you don't get DDR2 or below, DDR3 is perfectly good however DDR2 is very slow. As an example of what I'm saying, a 256MB DDR3 8600GT would be faster then a 1GB DDR2 8600GT. In order for the memory to be useful, there are a number of requires: That the memory is good quality stuff, that the core of the card is sufficiently fast to utilize such memory, and that your other components won't bottleneck it.

In a nutshell I recommend this, given your other specs:

http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=426714

LithiumKid1976

Thanks for the advice, much appreciated.
it looks like good value.


Thanks