A Wee Upgrade

plonk

So its seems my gpu is on the way out its a powercolour radeon x800gt and has served me well over 5 years.

I dont have a huge amount of spare cash at the moment so i was going to pick up a few bits on adverts namely a Gigabyte Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT 512Mb for 25 and an intel e6600 to replace a pentium d950 for hopefully less than 40.

The only game I really play is trackmania while and also do a bit of image processing.

Just wondering what are your opinions on these as im out of the loop when it comes to hardware.

Thanks

Moon54

Don't know the game, but if the budget could strech to €49 you could get
a new Sapphire HD5450 1GB DDR3 Graphics Card from Amazon, with free shipping.
The Amazon reviews speak for themselves, and it's a relatively modern card compared to the 2-3 year old 8600GT.

Jonny7

Get an ATI 4670 512mb

twice as fast as the 8600gt

- you won't have to change drivers
- no power plug needed, just slot in
- will actually play almost all modern games
- 60 euros new, 40 euro or less on ebay second hand, loads floating about

great little card

Jonny7

Moon54 wrote: »

Don't know the game, but if the budget could strech to €49 you could get
a new Sapphire HD5450 1GB DDR3 Graphics Card from Amazon, with free shipping.
The Amazon reviews speak for themselves, and it's a relatively modern card compared to the 2-3 year old 8600GT.

I'd wager that card is slower than the x800

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/HD_5450/29.html

plonk

So i picked up the card tonight and unfortunately its not as good as the x800gt running trackmania. Was getting 35-40 frames per second at 1900x1080 with everything on full and now with everything on full im getting less than 20:(.

Im putting this down to dx9 vs dx10 but with things turned down a bit its still very playable just not as beautiful. One thing I will say though is now my pc is completely silent;).

Will be picking up the e6600 friday so hopefully that will boost performance enough.

Current specs

Pentium D950
Gigabyte P965 DS3
2GB ddr2 6400 gskill 800mhz
Zalman cpns9700
Gigabyte 8600gt 512mb
3 x hdd
Creative xfi extrememusic
550watt psu
Antec P180

and Benq G2420HD

Tea_Bag

are you using the most upto date drivers for card, from Nvidia.com, not from the CD it came with?

ie driver version 266.58?

plonk

Ya updated and and a bigger problem is that the blacks look all washed out, looks **** tbh. GPU in game running at 60degrees 45 idle. Tried to take a screenshot but its not letting me for some reason.

Any ideas??

plonk

Just went into nvidia control panel and went tinkering with settings and looking better and up to 22fps with everything maxed.

Dont have a clue what im doing though

Depressing, I was thinking this card would be better than the x800 but its not better for what I need it to do.

Jonny7

The 8600GT is a terrible card to have at this stage

It doesn't matter when a card is released or how fancy the name is, or how much memory they staple onto it, its just the raw power that counts

Heres a chart from almost 3 years ago, look for any card from the 4670 and above to get nice frames
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Powercolor/HD_4670/26.html

(for reference your 8600GT is about same speed as 3650)

Monotype

IIRC, the 8600GT was actually worse than the 7600GT. The 8600GT should be a bit better than the 6600GT which was around the X700 mark. It definitely wouldn't be much improvement over the x800GT, if any. Still, I suppose €25 isn't too bad, but it's more of a backup card. A driver cleaner might help. Or a reinstallation of the game?

Is the e6600 compatible with your current motherboard?

plonk

Installed the e6600 and everything is running much smoother.

My sister is picking up a new printer from dabs and i was thinking of getting 2 more sticks of ram. The problem is, is that I already have

Gskill ram ddr2 6400 cl5 5-5-5-15

and all i can find on dabs is a corsair kit with latency of 5-5-5-18. just wondering will this make any difference.

And any recommendations on a HDD from dabs preferably 1tb

Thanks