I plan to upgrade my video card. I am ordering it on June 2nd and at the moment, my eye is on a Radeon X850XT, PCI-E. I am upgrading from a Radeon 9250 PCI.
Games I plan on playing:
Unreal Tournament 2004
Empire Earth 2
Doom 3
Fear
Roller Coaster Tycoon 3
The Sims 2
My budget is $130-$140 but I really don’t want to go over, I don’t have a job yet and I hate asking my parents for anything expensive. I have an AMD 64 Processor, so that shouldn’t be a problem.
Any suggestions? Idea's on if this is a good idea? Thanks, appreciate it.
It depends on some things. Obviously you have a PCI-E slot on your mother board, but what kind of board is it? If it's SLI compatible you might think about going for SLI cards, that way in the future you can add another card instead of buying a new one.
If you plan to game then I would definetly go with a GeForce. You can get them right from Nvidia or go with BFG, Asus, etc. It's all generally the same card but with different support. Nvidia doesn't overclock their cards and charges more, but has much better support. The GeForce series also supports SLI.
If you go with a Radeon then don't be surprised if it doesn't perform as well, they are the most efficient for video editing and 3D applications. The X850XT is a great card though and will have no problem playing any of those games.
thinking is like pong, it's easy, but you miss sometimes.
Alight, thanks for the advice. Hopefully when I get a job over the summer, my budget for a new card will be much larger. Who knows, eventually after saving up for a while, I'll be patient and get a top notch card for $500, rather then a budget card. Just so long as I can play that small list of games smoothly, I'll be happy. How would Age of Empires 3 run on Radeon X850XT, would you know?
PS: I have a PCI-E motherboard, I opened the PC up the first day I got it, just to check.
I'm not sure where I heard that. :S I wasn't bullshitting, just what I heard.
I don't think video editing is totally reliant on the CPU though. Also it is the video card that plays back the video and a better card supports higher quality video. I am certain that Radeon is superior in video playback.
I'm not going to start a war on which card is better, I've used both and I don't care. So go around and look at some becnhmarks, GeForce is usually better for most games, some games are designed to use Radeon's architecture which obviously gives an advantage.
Anyways, Your card will have no problem running AoE3.
thinking is like pong, it's easy, but you miss sometimes.
It all depends on the application you use. Get Nvidia, it is the MOST used brand and is designed for games. I got a 80 dollar SLI mobo and a couple of the basic SLI video cards for 120 each and right now it is taking everything i throw at it.
Well the rest of my PC specs are:
Athlon 64 3200 (2.2GHz)
1GB/ram
160GB/HD
So if anyone can maybe fire some links of some recommended videocards? $130-$160 if you can, thanks. I'm still looking around, but my knowledge over hardware is still kind of poor, hense the reason I'm asking around.
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