Video card shopping

[james]

Been out of the video card need since I bought an nvidia 9600 gt oc
a while ago. I'm looking on new egg for video cards and see
theres 2gb cards for as much as 1gb cards. The problem is I don't know
what I'm looking at any more. I have a 950 watt power supply running
win7 64 home with 6th of ram. Was thinking of spending about 150 on a 2 gb card.
I'd like to stick with nvidia though. Can anyone make some suggestions for me please?

[Debrody]

150 bucks for a 2GB card?
Theres a 2GB gtx 550 for about the same price, but i would rather choose the 1GB gddr5 one.

[james]

YeahIi saw that one. I'm looking to upgrade but want to get something I can run full strength with aces high. Right now i run a 512mb card and can't get steady 59-60 without just the terrain bump and local water detail checked. Everything else is off and I'd like to turn it all on and have a decent game. Why wouldn't you want the 2gb video card over  the 1 GB card? is it the DDR?

[guncrasher]

not sure what type of case you have, but most vc are way bigger than your 9600.  also what is your mobo/cpu.  you dont want to get something that will bottle neck your cpu.

semp

[titanic3]

If AH is the only game you play, I wouldn't go all out and buy brand new GPUs. I have a Radeon 5570 that runs AH maxed with everything setting except shadows resolution above 2048.

Best part, is that it's 60-70 bucks, has Dx11, and uses less than 30 Watts and is dead silent.

It's also pretty small, no larger than 8/9 inches. Also cones with low profile brackets if you need it (I didn't). Very cheap, very silent, stays cool, quite small. On a sidenote, I can run BFBC2 at medium settings on 1440x900, Black Ops on max at 1600x900, AH at 50-60 FPS, Company of Heroes at 1920x1080 maxed, MS Flight Sim Ultra setting 1440x900 at 30-40 FPS, Mass Effect 2 maxed 1920x1080, and Amnesia the Dark Descent maxed 1920x1080.

[james]

AHII is the main game I play. There's other games coming that kind of leave it in the dirt as far as graphics though that i'll be trying out. I really would like to run AHII maxed out though. The PC is a HP 4 core 2.6GHZ with 6 GB of ram. It's an amd athlon IIx64 processor x 4. Its an HP I got from bestbuy with win7 64 bit and 6 GB of ram.
i havent upgraded the ram yet either. That's probably going to happen in a few months. The PS is a black widow 950 watt. Here's a dxdiag if that will show what I have better than me trying to explain it hehe. http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/index.php/topic,319729.0.html

[Debrody]

James,
your pc is very strong on some points, also very weak on others.
Your PSU is a very potent one, designed to run multiple high-end cards in SLI/Crossfire along with an overclocked i7 cpu.
Your CPU is an aging one, a bit slow nowadays, but still enough not to limit most of the vido cards on the market. Btw which socket your mobo has?
The RAM is pretty much enough for any CPU you can put into you mobo (you have it in 3 sticks, right?). It would  be near useless to upgrade it.
That 9600 gt is an aging card, but can run AH maxed out except the self-shadowing. The gtx 550 (for those 550 bucks) will be able to set the shadows to 4096, but no more.

Btw the ram on it: the ones equipped with 2GB rams hav the old ddr3. The 1GB ones have the much faster ddr5, so the smaller is the faster in this case. I would choose the ddr5 ones, or better, switch to the amd/ati and get a hd6790/6850 for about the same price. (as an alternate, i got my older ati 5830 for 130 bux. cheap, fast, but eats 170 watts... not a good choice) But if you dont play anything else totally maxed out but AH, that 9600gt still can serve you for a while, til the prices get pushed down.

[james]

Thanks debrody, just haven't looked at cards in a while nor even bought a new computer in about three to  four years.