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GFX Card Recommnedation Please

ant2k50

ant2k50

ant2k50

Associate
Joined
28 Aug 2008
Posts
124
Location
Nottingham
I'm looking for a new card for the system in my signature to replace the 9800GT - primarily because I occasionally want to connect the PC to a plasma television and I'd like sound through the HDMI. However, I do prefer Nvidia cards, is this possible? Could someone please recommend me a suitable Nvidia card? Budget around £100 - £200. Thanks.
 
almost all graphics cards have hdmi these days and all the cards with HDMI do sound over it

any 5 series will do and a 6 series would be a bit of a waste with your CPU
look for a good deal on a 560ti/570
 
If your running games like Battlefield 3 @ 1080p you mite want to think about a 560ti with 2 gigabyte vram as opposed to a 570 with only 1280mb vram.
 
horrorxpunk said:
If your running games like Battlefield 3 @ 1080p you mite want to think about a 560ti with 2 gigabyte vram as opposed to a 570 with only 1280mb vram.
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Except almost all reviews show the GTX570 1280MB faster than 6970/6950/GTX560Ti on BF3...

VRAM MAY be an issue, but giving up faster GPU for sake of more VRAM on a slower graphic card is not the answer, as with a slower GPU the lesser performance "will" be immediately, unlike the GTX570 lesser vram is only "may" affect performance and only comes when they come (of if they come).
 
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although with what nvidia drivers; there drivers consistently improve the speed of some gfx cards in games; and you may need that extra vram if using 4x MSAA as BF3 is recorded to use upto around 1.4gb vram I have a GTX580 and when I read my performance diagnostics logs it tell me I've been getting thrashing.
 
horrorxpunk said:
although with what nvidia drivers; there drivers consistently improve the speed of some gfx cards in games; and you may need that extra vram if using 4x MSAA as BF3 is recorded to use upto around 1.4gb vram I have a GTX580 and when I read my performance diagnostics logs it tell me I've been getting thrashing.
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I helped a friend bought a MSI GTX560Ti OC 2GB and overclocked it to 950MHz on the core clock. Even with the overclock, it simple doesn't have enough grunt for 4xAA together with mix of high and ultra at satisfying smoothness (oftenly with fps drop down to below 35fps), with the AA dropped to 2xAA, the fps was able to remain at 40fps+ at most of the time. So basically, GTX560Ti 2GB or GTX570 1.2GB would both ideally need to run on 2xAA anyway, but with the GTX570, the frame rate would be higher.
 
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With the KFA2 GTX 670 you will be laughing at the graphics performance for the next two years. It's got great vram and you can always SLI another card later on down the line for an increase in performance. Read some benchmarks and try get an idea of what price per performance is like for these cards.
 
horrorxpunk said:
With the KFA2 GTX 670 you will be laughing at the graphics performance for the next two years. It's got great vram and you can always SLI another card later on down the line for an increase in performance. Read some benchmarks and try get an idea of what price per performance is like for these cards.
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Yea? But are you gonna sponsor OP extra £100-£200?

And his Q6600 at 3.2GHz would bottleneck the GTX670 anyway.
 
horrorxpunk said:
In almost every system there is a bottleneck, but you are right I didn't read the CPU specs. Time to build a new system? :-D
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I was speaking from experience of upgrading from Q6600 overclocked to 3.6GHz to i5 2500K overclocked to 4.5GHz, my frame rate is more than doubled in online games that I play, despite I'm still on the same 5850. But the OP definitely need to upgrade his graphic card regardless, considering he got a 9800GT, not a minimum of 6850 or GTX460.

While is it true that bottleneck would happen, but the most important thing is try to balance it as well as possible. Pairing a slow CPU with a fast graphic card is the worst scenerio, as it simply won't use the graphic card to its full potential, and lowering graphic settings in game won't help much with frame rate; if graphic card was the bottleneck, people would at least have a choice to lower the graphic quality to trade for higher frame rate. Hate to say this, but your CPU at 4.0GHz won't be much faster than a Q6600 at 3.6GHz (if at all) in most games that use no more than 4 cores. Really wish you had asked for advice before jumping on Bulldozer.
 
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Well back to OP. How about getting a 570/7850 now, then save up for IB/Haswell? Since you're connecting it to a TV, the resolution will likely be 1920x1080, and either cards will play games on max with no problems. You just need to save up that extra money to get a better CPU to not bottleneck your system.
 
Marine-RX179 said:
I was speaking from experience of upgrading from Q6600 overclocked to 3.6GHz to i5 2500K overclocked to 4.5GHz, my frame rate is more than doubled in online games that I play, despite I'm still on the same 5850. But the OP definitely need to upgrade his graphic card regardless, considering he got a 9800GT, not a minimum of 6850 or GTX460.

While is it true that bottleneck would happen, but the most important thing is try to balance it as well as possible. Pairing a slow CPU with a fast graphic card is the worst scenerio, as it simply won't use the graphic card to its full potential, and lowering graphic settings in game won't help much with frame rate; if graphic card was the bottleneck, people would at least have a choice to lower the graphic quality to trade for higher frame rate. Hate to say this, but your CPU at 4.0GHz won't be much faster than a Q6600 at 3.6GHz (if at all) in most games that use no more than 4 cores. Really wish you had asked for advice before jumping on Bulldozer.
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Oh right I still get absolute max frames 60 fps on everything; but yeah I don't get much more than 50% core usage in some applications but the PC deffinately scored higher in 3DMark by quite a bit when switching from Phenom X4 970 to FX. I bought bulldozer well back in October when they first came out. Way way way back and I am more than happy with it. But I just built someone a 3570k and it made me think of going for an Ivybridge chip they run really nice. I have a solid state drive and to me the only bottleneck was load times. Now I load BF3 in 4 seconds. I can overclock my Bulldozer to 4.5 ghz no problem; I'm not too bothered about overclocking it basically I have it set like that so it uses 8 core turbo instead of running at 3.6ghz which it would do anyway and I don't like the 4 core 4.2ghz turbo mode. It scores me a 7.7 in WEI. memory gets a 7.8 and everything else 7.9 and I am using the new Windows 7 hotfixes for Bulldozer and will be upgrading to windows 8 which has better support for FX chips. But yeah I've done my reading now and intel seems the way to go I remember my friends i7 blasting through Bad Company 2 and couldn't help but think how much smoother it looked even though he had 2 x 460s in SLI and I was using a GTX 580. For my next upgrade I was considering a GTX 690 but I am considering a complete intel overhaul. Although I still really love my Bulldozer and CHV as I've had them both since launch and haven't had any problems but I really want to see what the grass is like on the other side of the fence.
 
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