Recommendations for a decent budget card?

mr.noobie

hey guys, im looking to buy im looking for a decent enough card capable of playing mw2 and the likes any recommendations?? not rele willing to go over 150 euro funds are a bit tight atm

lmimmfn

whats your pc spec?

mr.noobie

AMD Athlon II X4 605e
4Gb Ram
GeForce 6150SE nForce 430

not really sure what the motherboard is

lmimmfn

Ahh you should be good for a decent card then so. That cpu was only released the end of last year so mobo should be PCIE2.0.

If your budget is 150euro id get a 5770 1Gig card, for about 190euro you could get an nvidia 460, both are excellent cards for gaming. If you have an LCD that displays 1920x1080 i would go for an Nvidia 460, but if youre using a resolution of 1680x1050 or less the 5770 is more than capible

mr.noobie

im actually using a 42 inch plasma tv as my monitor with its vga connection

lmimmfn

what resolution is it? its it 1080p? if it is 1080p id go for the 460 if you want to play all games maxed out with some AA

Also how long are you going to keep the card and are there any games specifically you want to play?

mr.noobie

yeah its 1080p ill prolly keep the card for awhile about a year or so i specifically plan on playin gears of war halo 2 and wow, there all fairly old but ill prolly get some more recent games in time, starcraft 2 for example

lmimmfn

the 5770 would be fine at 1080p for those old games, SC2 would need a little more oomph so you'd have to lower the settings( same in some areas of WoW ). If you can go for an Nvidia 460, should be good to max out everything at 1080p for the next year but its slightly beyond your budget.

Its entirely upto whether you'd like to max out everything and have some AA or not, the 5770 will struggle with AA at that resolution on recent titles.

mr.noobie

i think ill go for the 460 its not drasticially over my budget anyway. thanks for the advice anyway much appreciated

lmimmfn

no probs at all, if you can( i know i know more cash ) but get the 1Gb version, theres more than just a memory size difference, the 1Gb one has a higher memory bus( better for higher resolutions and AA and has 32ROP's as oppossed to 24 in the 768Mb one ) - http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=1899&pageID=9298

you can read the review from the link above but heres a link for performance difference - http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=1899&pageID=9318

Theres summit wrong in that review with the Bad Company 2 graphs( i thing they got the 1Gb and 768Mb ones mixed up, the text is fine though, i.e. states explicitly that the 1Gb on is better )

WEST

I tempted to buy a Geforece 460 1Gb since my 8800 gts 320 is having trouble playing metro 2033, because of this I decided to play Borderlands and Starcraft 2 for now which the 8800 gts 320 had no problem with once AA or AF is not used.

Can anyone advise if its worth getting the Geforece 460 1Gb or is it best wait for the Radeon 6000 series? It should be released in Q4 2010 (I hope). Maybe it's better wait for the mainstream Radeon 6000 series card or for the Radeon 5850\Geforce 460 1Gb to drop in price with the 6000 series is released?

Current PC spec is:
Core 2 duo e6600 oc'ed to 3Ghz
4Gb Ram
MB: Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 with PCI Express X16 slot (this is still compatable with the new cards)

Thanks.

Chuck Finlay

WEST wrote: »

Can anyone advise if its worth getting the Geforece 460 1Gb or is it best wait for the Radeon 6000 series? It should be released in Q4 2010 (I hope). Maybe it's better wait for the mainstream Radeon 6000 series card or for the Radeon 5850\Geforce 460 1Gb to drop in price with the 6000 series is released?

Looks like Radeon6000 is aiming for Q1/2011.
The 460 is very good value and if you need a card _now_, get one. There will always be price drops and any GPU will always be outdated 6-12 months later, anyway. Plus no one really knows yet what the Radeon 6000 will be like, performance- or price-wise.

lmimmfn

Chuck Finlay wrote: »

Looks like Radeon6000 is aiming for Q1/2011.
The 460 is very good value and if you need a card _now_, get one. There will always be price drops and any GPU will always be outdated 6-12 months later, anyway. Plus no one really knows yet what the Radeon 6000 will be like, performance- or price-wise.

First 6000 cards are to come in October, but theyre Southern Islands cards( i.e. 28nm as opposed to 40nm but very little difference in Architecture ). The Northern Islands cards are delayed until sometime next year( they are the ones to look out for as they will have a new architecture )

*EDIT* make that november according to todays Fud

Solitaire

lmimmfn wrote: »

First 6000 cards are to come in October, but theyre Southern Islands cards( i.e. 28nm as opposed to 40nm but very little difference in Architecture ). The Northern Islands cards are delayed until sometime next year( they are the ones to look out for as they will have a new architecture )

*EDIT* make that november according to todays Fud

From what I've seen its actually the other way around - new architecture this year (Southern Is.) but still on the same process in the HD6000s, then sometime next year a few late-gen HD6000s and the HD7000 series (Northern Is.) retaining that architecture on the next process node (was 32nm but now switched to 28nm, causing delays to Northern)

lmimmfn

Solitaire wrote: »

From what I've seen its actually the other way around - new architecture this year (Southern Is.) but still on the same process in the HD6000s, then sometime next year a few late-gen HD6000s and the HD7000 series (Northern Is.) retaining that architecture on the next process node (was 32nm but now switched to 28nm, causing delays to Northern)

Nooo, you caught me in to threads with the same thing lol.

But nope, youre defo wrong in this one, both Northern Islands and Southern Islands were originally due this year( all this is rumours btw and noone knows ) but N.I. was delayed due to fabrication and also the new architecture. If you read the zillions of articles most of them state Southern Islands is the architecture improvement. Northern Islands is the new architecture.

But hey, at this stage Bosco prob knows better

Chuck Finlay

lmimmfn wrote: »

If you read the zillions of articles

Youre right, I got them confused
But it's really a mess, lots of reports with no real rumors, hints or data. Can't wait to see some performance numbers on these, haven't had an ATI since the Radeon9600XT