recommendations on video cards

my old man’s lookin to upgrade his video card in his pc… currently he has whatever came in his dell. basically looking for the best bang for his buck, i know he doesn’t wanna spend outrageous $$$, but at the same time he wants something that can keep up with the newer games. anybody buy anything recently for a good price?

Maybe some specs on the PC at hand?

If it’s old, even a new vid. card won’t help him out much. How old is it, what model fo Dell? Or even better if you can get the service tag we can look it up and find out what kind of video card it will support.

i don’t know what model/tag off the top of my head… it’s not real old(maybe 2 years)… xp, 1gb ram. 180gb hd

You can’t really go wrong with a Radeon 3850 for $170ish or a Geforce 8800GT for $225ish, unless the power supply isin’t up to the task.

agp, pci, pci express???

I have always liked nvidia more than ati. I had a nvidia pci express 7600gt and it was damn good for about $80.

As of late ATI’s been slipping fast. Can’t go wrong with Nvidia.

I need to buy a PC to test out a FireGL 7200.

Here is the one I got. It is not the most badass card on the market, but does pretty well for alot of games and is rather inexpensive.

http://www.circuitcity.com/ssm/eVGA-e-GeForce-6200-LE-Video-Card-256A8N295DX/sem/rpsm/oid/162040/catOid/-13043/rpem/ccd/productDetail.do

Inexpensive indeed:

If the original poster is looking to play crysis or call of duty 4, that card isin’t going to cut it.

I’ve got a GeForce 7600GS… Only thing I don’t like is it has a heatsink instead of a fan on the GPU, but other than that it’s smooth.

I can run Battlefield 2142 at full graphics with no issues. but I don’t play many games so I don’t know how that really benchmarks.

look at the 7600gt, it’s about that price and has the ddr3 memory. It ran FEAR, Oblivion, etc… really well.

buy the best Radeon you can afford.

fixed

x2.

Until ATI can come out with a new chipset comparable to Nvidia’s latest, there’s really no other choice to make.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150253

200 after rebate and free shipping. It is a great video card

150 after rebate and free shipping and still good.

Both those cards will play Crysis pretty good, the first one on close to max settings, the 2nd one on medium settings.

this seems to be a pretty big deal to him all of a sudden. i guess he downloaded videos of the game online and now has to have it? is the top one really a good card. everyone seems to think nvidia is the way to go.

he’s into games like crysis and cod4

From the reviews I read, most people said it will play Bioshock, COD4, and others on the highest settings. They said Crysis will play, but its better on like med or high. Make sure your power supply is good enough. Probably want at least 500w. And that card does have the Nvidia chipset in it.

This is the one I bought recently for my PC: http://www.newegg.com/product/product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127305

It plays COD4 and Crysis beautifully on medium settings. The rest of the system is also beefed up pretty good to support it though. (quad core CPU with 8gb system memory). There are slightly better deals if you don’t need dual DVI output. Similar cards with single DVI/VGA outputs are less expensive.

how does 64 bit run the games? Is it vista or xp?

Its Vista and plays them pretty well. The graphics card is the weak point in my setup. I only play a handful of games and not very often at that. But for a casual gamer it does the trick. I haven’t over clocked it at all either and have read of great results in over clocking this card.