Graphics card upgrade

[stupplex]

I currantly have a Gforce TI4600 128mb card and im looking to upgrade. Have about £150 to spend. Just wondering what sort of card i should be looking for. I'd like to stick with Nvidia as ive always had them and never had a problem.

I saw a GeFORCE 256MB FX5600XT at a good price. This a good card? would i see much of an improvement?

Any help on this would be great.

[Brunnen-G]

For that kind of you should either get:

Radeon 9800Pro 128MB for £125 (Good)

or

GeForce 6800 128MB for £175 (Better)

The 5600 you mention is a very poor card and you would not see much of an increase. HTH.

[visualunderground]

For that kind of you should either get:

Radeon 9800Pro 128MB for £125 (Good)

or

GeForce 6800 128MB for £175 (Better)

The 5600 you mention is a very poor card and you would not see much of an increase. HTH.

I would definately recomend the "vannila" 6800, I am in the same position as you same budget etc, and bought Custom PC MAG over the weekend, beceause it had a special on doom3 and x800 Vs 6800 cards. I was very suprised to see (page 8ish) that the vannila, ie non GT/Ultra got quicker frame rates than the X800 Pro at doom 3! The X800 pro is a £300 card. If you can stretch the extra £25 the difference in performance will be outstanding.

Ebuyer have got an XFX one at the moment for £175, the bigger brother of this card, the GT, won the groups test by the way.

link (http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?action=c2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=62623)

[Busby]

In the same situation myself.

With about £180 to spend on graphics card.

Was going to go with the 9800pro but may look at the Geforce 6800 instead now. is it that much better than the 9800?

ta

[Ono]

I always feel that you should match your graphics card with your CPU as well.

If your cpu is too slow it would be the limiting factor and make the extra grunt on the newer (6800/X800) cards redundant.

Generally though, the 9800 Pros are the ones to go for if you have a mid-range machine.

[MAXDAN]

I'm looking for a new graphics card too and am probably going with the 9800pro rather than the vanilla 6800. Other than in doom 3 (and probably other openGL type games) the 9800pro is only a bit behind the 6800 (10% or so on most benchmarks) and the openGL results may be sorted out in later driver releases. I couldn't justify the extra £50 for the small gain in performance and no real extra future-proofing as the 6800 vanilla has only 12 pipelines and DDR1 memory so is very crippled compared to a proper 6800 card. The 9800pro will run everything now and all the imminent releases (halflife 2 etc) at 1024*768 without any problem so it will do for now.

I am planning to upgrade again next year when the next crop of new cards come out, so this is probably effecting my thinking. I do fancy 2 6800GT's in an SLI interface, it reminds me of the old 3dfx days. :dork:

[Pazman2k]

Definitely the 9800 Pro, great value for money at the moment. You wont be disappointed with them.

I went from a Ti4600 to a 9800 nonPro (flashed it to Pro) and the difference was noticable :)

[RonnyJ]

You won't get any better than a 9800 Pro at around the £125 price point, I wouldn't limit yourself to just NVidia.

As for the 5600XT, you really wouldn't notice much difference at all compared to your current card.