Looking for a new video card

Remove all ads!

Ah, I catch your drift Taza. Funny thing is that because of the weird pricing schemes of Dell, I have a huge case under my desk that probably could handle the power and cooling of much more advanced stuff than I currently have in it. But I wasn't really looking for an upgrade in the first place, I could have happily used my 8800GT for a while, too bad it thought otherwise

The Gigabyte version looks good. Time for a bit of price comparing tomorrow and I can start using my pc again

 

460GX or 6850 from ATi. Both are similar in price and performance. You can't lose with either.

Did your old GPU have a lifetime warranty? If it does; the manufactor will replace it with a card that is similar to it in peformance using today standard compared to when you bought it.

 

Hmm, didn't check. Who would give lifetime warranty on a videocard? They are usually the first thing to break in my experience and only get a certain amount of mileage before they break down. (Although I was using a 15 year old card while waiting for my new one. Somehow it still works, but everything I had in between broke )

But my GTS 450 arrived a few hours ago, and I just plugged it in. Time to play a few video games to see how they look

 

I take it you favour nVidia over ATI (or AMD as it's called nowadays)?

It's true that the nVidia cards have better tesselation performance, which is part of the differences between DX9 and DX10/11, and that with nVidia you get CUDA support. But tesselation is mostly used in benches at the moment, barely in games, and CUDA is nice if you want to use your desktop as a renderfarm, but not much use to the regular consumer.

As for heat... you do know what power hogs the nVidia cards are, right? In this respect the AMD cards perform much better, consuming much less power. The GTX480, for example, being the opponent of the HD5870, did beat that card in the performance tests, but needed almost 100 W extra to pull this off.

I haven't heard about any reliability issues with the current cards (though I don't exactly keep up on this news), but as I recall the previous nVidia line up (GTX285 and such, I believe) had some serious issues with failling cards.

Driver support for nVidia is generally better, though AMD has certainly improved this much over the past few years and nVidia's track record isn't exactly clean either. If you have a Linux machine, driver support for nVidia is definitely better, though.

@ Mesmero,
If you're dutch, definitely check out this site for price comparisons (and hardware reviews, for that matter). Probably too late to be useful advice to you by now, but still a good one for maybe a next upgrade or some such.

Just in case you still haven't decided, it would also be helpful to know what resolution your 22'' screen has (I'm guessing 1680x1050, but could be wrong), and what games you're hoping to play and on which settings, so we can be sure you get the performance you're looking for.

/edit
If every card you've had so far broke down, I'm wondering what kind of power supplies you've been using so far and if your cases have had sufficient cooling. It's unfortunate that many people and also pre-build PCs cut costs on the PSU, when this is a component of the PC that can fry any component if it gives out.

 

Yup, too late. But thanks for you're info. That's the beauty if SP, always a helpful soul around

My last three videocards that broke down were in three different cases. My current case is a huge gaming case from Dell, with three massive vents, so I don't think cooling is too much of a problem. The back might have been a bit too close to the wall previously, so I moved it a little forwards. It has a good 25cm of space now. As for power supplies, I have no clue. It has whatever Dell put in it. I think I just have bad luck with videocards.

 

To answer your points in order.

I agree that DX9 performance matters more at the present time, but the number of games using DX10/DX11 features is constantly increasing.

Comparing anything to nVidia GF100 series is kinda silly - the GF100 series is very powerful but also pretty much a space heater, and the one set of cards that is. The GF104 series is a better comparison point.

A nope.avi on this point - ATI still failed more than nVidia at the worst point. Though, GF100 could well be failing more than current ATI cards... if the cooling isn't up to par. Again, space heaters.

nVidia's track record with drivers - except for bloat - is clean except for that one problem when Vista came out. That was fixed completely. Fortunately, because nobody could stand that bug, given it crashed nVidia systems every five seconds for a few months.
ATI's improved it's drivers, but honestly, they're still horrible.

So yeah, I usually prefer nVidia - mostly because I tend to boot multiple operating systems - but the GF100 series (GTX 465 / GTX 470 / GTX 480) was a horrible failure.

 

On all fora on the planet there are ATI/AMD fanpersons and Nvidia fanpersons.

My last 6 cards: 9800pro, X1600XT, HD2600XT. HD 3870, HD 4870, HD 6850.

The only two driver issues I had was with the 2600 in the game Bioshock (no dx10for a few months), and with the 3870 playing Sacred2 (memory).

I still respect Nvidia.