What GFX card and where to buy

marco murphy

What GFX card should i get and where should i get it cheap?

neokenzo

Whats your budget?

marco murphy

100-150

tuxy

well i will assume you want a agp crad
http://komplett.ie/k/ki.asp?sku=123738&cks=PRL

marco murphy

Thanks

Nukem

Just in http://boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=213050

marco murphy

I wish i could have it tomorrow,i have only a 100 right now.

duridian

You really ought to hang on for another bit till you have at least the price of a 6600GT. If you were to rush out now and buy something for just the €100-€150 you would only be disappointed in a matter of months when you found it wasn't performing so well in the newer games. A 9800 Pro might not be a bad choice but if you've saved that close to the mark you may as well wait a small bit more for the 6600GT. Naturally online would be the best place to get it from, www.komplett.ie or www.overclockers.co.uk or www.jes-computer.de being the ones most favoured by Boardies.

marco murphy

Your rite mate,just the xmas hype u know,iam mad,i wanna play,ive a ****ty PC anyway..celeron....****ty ram...:(

Thordon

My brother had a 9800 pro, celeron 2.7ghz, 3/4 gig of DDR333 ram, but his performance in games wasnt very good. For christams he got a Athlon 64 2800+ and a new mobo, the performance is MUCH better, graphics card alone wont solve your problem, it will be held back by your slow CPU too. The 2800+ and the mobo cost him about 200 euro, something to consider.

marco murphy

Yeh thanks.Iam afraid to handle mobos tho :P ill have a look

marco murphy

What about a bundle/upgrade or a barebone off komplett?

duridian

Komplett don't have a great selection at the moment in the line of upgrade bundles. I think you'd be better getting specific individual parts that are known as good gaming parts. eg.
This Athlon chip is said to be good value and apparently overclocks well
This motherboard is fairly popular and has some good features for the money
Two of these sticks of ram should be fairly nippy
I'm not recommending this card itself, but as it is the same price as the more favoured Leadtek model, and the Leadtek isn't stocked by Komplett, I just added it in for completion of my example
So €119 + €155 + €100 + €219 = €593 not incl. delivery is what you are really looking at. It ain't cheap this upgrading lark.
You could also consider getting a P4 chip for your existing rig to replace that Celeron. Would depend of course on what motherboard is in it at present as to how viable this would be.

marco murphy

i thinka new chip would do great...my mobo is ASUS P4S533-MX

duridian

A quick look at Asus website shows that you have a board with Sis 651 chipset, integrated graphics (but fortunately also an AGP slot so you can upgrade the graphics), a choice of either SDRAM or DDRAM (if you're currently on SDRAM then that's another area for improvement, you'll have to have either one or the other can't use both types together), support for 3GHz+ 533MHz FSB processors (well 3.06GHz is the fastest P4 available of that kind anyway, the bad news is they are harder to find nowadays, you ideally need a Northwood CPU with 533FSB, there are Prescotts and Celeron Ds with this FSB but your board may have problems with these newer cores).
So far this is the only place I've seen still selling a 533 Northwood:
http://www.munstercomputers.com/acatalog/cpu_intel.html
... and they want €266 for it, which is ridiculous so maybe the second hand market is your best bet. If I find any others I'll try and let you know on boards.
Better get off to bed now just realised it's half 4 and I'm still up. :eek:

marco murphy

Thanks mate.I have ddr RAM,iam off toPCworld soon,ill be first outside the door probably and i wanna get some ram,maybe bring it up to 512.Ill get a gfx card soon.Thanks for the procs advice,i need it.

marco murphy

ok 512 ram now thank god.Real differencenow which gfx card

Shrimp

yeah.. no problem, your welcome!

Da_cOmRaDe_MiKe

/me strokes his athlon 64 3700+

marco murphy

Shrimp wrote:

yeah.. no problem, your welcome!

Yes everyone,thanks to shrimp.He gave me great help.
Fair Play

Now which GFX card, i like the one in the link up there from komplett

Da_cOmRaDe_MiKe

http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.asp?sku=122900&cks=SPK = its cheap, its good and it play's nearly all games fine. ( i have no problem so far )

http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.asp?sku=303928&cks=SPK = a little more expensive but still good.

http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.asp?sku=303922&cks=SPK = this is what i really want...

http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.asp?sku=300417&cks=SPK = this is a beast. but you would buy a p.c for that price.

marco murphy

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/9500_to_9600_Series.html

Hows that?


EDIT: i like the first one.What can i play on it,

Nukem

d the spec here 64bit

EDIT: Try the 9550 wit the 256mb and the 128bit,tenner more (ish) and double the performance

marco murphy

Thanks nuke.Doesnt have to be that,100 or around that is my budjet,i wanna try and get one in shop forums

duridian

the 9550 series are fairly lightweight performers, they would be considerably less powerful than cards like the 9800Pro and would not be too good for future games. If you want to play Doom3/Far Cry/HL2 type of stuff you should aim a bit higher.
OcUK have a 9700 Pro here for about £91 sterling which should be under €150. This would be fairly close performance wise to a 9800(non-pro) and is probably the most bang for your buck out there in new cards at the moment.
By the way I saw a link to an ATI X700 further up the thread. Be aware that is a PCI-Express based card not an AGP card, so you would need a different motherboard for that.
Also if you are interested there is a guy on the shop forums selling some P4 chips, he has a pair of 2.4P4 533FSB, he's asking €90, you might be able to haggle him down a bit. If you did replace it with a P4 chip, you might be able to get about €40 or so if you then sold your own 2.4 Celeron
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=211058
Just some ideas for you to consider.

marco murphy

Yep thanks.Leave the celeron for now.I was playing far cry...!!!!
Not brilliant deail but aim hooked.Selling PS2...so i should be up to 200!

Which one now :P

duridian

Well if you're up to €200 you are getting very close to the price of a 6600GT so that should probably now be your main aim, to save a little bit more and get one of those.
OcUK have the Leadtek one (the best one) reduced a little in price this week to £144.47 here
A quick conversion at www.xe.com/ucc shows this to be about €205. Carriage would be extra though but it is still a good deal.
See this thread for some info on why the Leadtek is the best choice and what 6600GTs to avoid.

marco murphy

Thanks mate.

Nukem

I would wait maybe a week or so longer. All the new line of Gfx cards are coming in - the 850 and the 800xl so that will drive the price of cards down a bit (i Hope)

But the 6600gt looks like a rock solid gfx

marco murphy

And how far will ey go down?

EDIT:what do i need for farcry to look GREAT!?

Nukem

Poblachtach wrote:

And how far will ey go down?

Your guess is as good as mine but. The nForce4 mobos should all be in by Jan and with the x850 showing speeds close to Ultras id say the prices must drop.
As i said *I hope* 05 is a whole new year.

duridian

I hope you're right Nuke, I reckon I'll be gunning for some more graphics power in the Spring, though I could be seduced away from it for a while if a sleek enough TFT monitor wags its DVI connector in my face...... mmm pixels..... doh!

Nukem

Well thats my take on it. see the review here and the prices in Komplett for the 850 here is close to a GT price and as you can see by the review the 850 packs just a little bit more Punch (sarcasm)

bp_me

This is the card im putting in my new pc:
http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.asp?sku=305188&cks=PRL

marco murphy

They say keep away from SEs?

bp_me

Poblachtach wrote:

They say keep away from SEs?

For any specific reason? maybe i should rethink.

marco murphy

Retail...Dunno.Il get back to you.Sorry,my techy freind had a reason.

duridian

If it's the 256bit 9800SE it wouldn't be too bad, but that link doesn't actually say whether it's the 128bit or the 256bit model, just tells you that there's 256MB of ram. Both have the 9800 core running at 325MHz, but as well as the crippling effect of reducing the memory interface to 128bit, the memory of the 128bit version is also clocked lower at 250MHz (256bit SE has 290MHz memory). this cuts the internal bandwidth of the card down to 8.0GB/sec compared to the 256bit which has 18.6GB/sec. By comparison a (proper) 9800Pro 256bit has bandwidth of 21.8GB/s so I think you can see how much closer the 256bit SE is to this than the 128bit SE which is more in 9600 Pro territory. The reason I said "proper" before 9800Pro earlier is because there is a similarly banjoed 9800Pro model which should be avoided at all costs. Ebay is actually flooded with these yokes and I'm sure a lot of misfortunes are parting with their readies completely unaware that the lovely new 9800Pro they are buying is in fact nothing like the card they are expecting.

marco murphy

I think iam gonna aim at 6600

bp_me

Thanks for that. I'll have a look at some other cards so.

marco murphy

what money you got mate?

duridian

hey bp_me I don't wanna put you off this 9800SE card completely. It might be the good one, you should e-mail Komplett and ask them to clarify if the card has a 128bit or a 256bit memory interface. It may be a mix up on their web page they may have said 256MB when they actually meant 256bit. According to Sapphire websites their Radeon 9800SE cards come with only 128MB of ram, however they do seem to make both 128bit and 256bit models.
See here on Sapphire's Global site they have the 128bit model listed
and then here on their Euro/German site they have it down as being a 256bit card.
So like I say emailing Komplett is the only thing I can suggest.

marco murphy

Well ive been told twice to stay away.

marco murphy

Now i am told well 6600 is fine, just your pc wont be able to keep up with the card
??

duridian

Yeah, I could have been one of the people advising that myself purely because of the uncertainty when there's a fairly alright model and a similarly named but completely crap model.

marco murphy

SE s is a remake isnt it?

duridian

The 6600GT will improve your pc's graphic abilities big time. If the pc overall was faster then yes it would probably perform faster too but it doesn't mean you can't use a 6600GT with a Celeron, it just won't be used to it's absolute max.

marco murphy

Yep thanks.Its fast enough with the RAM,ill concider your new procs suggestion afterwards,Whta else might i need for a fast PC?

duridian

Poblachtach wrote:

SE s is a remake isnt it?

SE cards are a cut down version of the "Standard" model. They usually have the same GPU but are often clocked a bit slower and are equipped with slower ram also. There are loads of variations on this idea, Georce FX5900XT, Geforce 6800LE, Radeon 9200SE, Geforce 5700LE are further examples of these kind of cards. Can get confusing coz while a 5900XT is a cut down Nvidia card, a 9800XT is a higher classed card than a 9800 Pro. People theorise that these are built using GPU cores that didn't meet all the demands required in testing and so were shunted off to be used in slower cards, while the better cores are used in Pro/Ultra cards.

marco murphy

6600 i really want.Wonder will PCworld ever by any chance have that 150euro 6600gts again...:(

duridian

Poblachtach wrote:

Yep thanks.Its fast enough with the RAM,ill concider your new procs suggestion afterwards,Whta else might i need for a fast PC?

Further down the line you could think about things like hard drives etc. but don't worry about them for now. Graphics, ram and cpu are the best initial things to improve where gaming is concerned. Righto I'm off to bed. Talk to ye later.