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£100 for a PCI card which one?

Matrix

Matrix

Matrix

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I'm looking to buy a PCI card for around a £100 can anyone recommended me one.

I don't play a lot of games but i would like to play BF2 but my 5 year old 64meg Radeon won't play much these days.
And i am looking to update my system but i've not got a clue about cards at all.

Was looking at this HIS ATI Radeon X1650 Pro ICEQ Turbo 256MB GDDR3 AVIVO TV-Out/Dual DVI .


Any advice please?
 
Well what's the rest of your system? You can only get so much improvement with a graphics card and adding a new graphics card to a 5 year old system will just mean you can run games unacceptably slowly at a higher resolution, rather than them completely grinding to a halt.

An analogy I saw recently about putting a new graphics card in an old system was using a ferarri (although an X1650Pro is more of a mid range Polo) to run a courier company. It's fast but it can't carry anything. The PCI bus itself is a bottleneck - Do they even do that card on PCI? Battlefield 2 in particular needs a good CPU and lots of RAM or will slow down unbearably.

PCI express (or PCI-E - what the X1650Pro is probably built on) is something different entirely. My advice would be to save up and wait until you can build or buy a well balanced PC with recent CPU and at least 1GB RAM, as well as a decent graphics card.

Edit: I guess if you're asking about a PCI card you don't have an AGP slot? If you don't have one of those I'd retire the PC to a life of simple office tasks and internet use.
 
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Aside from what was said above, assuming you actually do have a PCI-Express X16 port and a decent CPU/RAM, avoid that card cos it is just a refresh of another not great card.

For the same money as that you can get a 7600 GT, which is faster.
 
Yeah sorry people i'm looking at buying this too.

Intel Core 2 DUO E6300
Gigabyte GA_965P_DS4
GeIL 2GB (2x1GB) PC5300 667MHz Value DDR2
 
Ahh that's better. You'll be wanting PCI-E then. I'd go with the 7600GT if you're buying new. That card should be quite happy in most games up to 1280x1024. Might have a few other suggestions if you can push a little way above £100 though.
 
Uriel said:
Ahh that's better. You'll be wanting PCI-E then. I'd go with the 7600GT if you're buying new. That card should be quite happy in most games up to 1280x1024. Might have a few other suggestions if you can push a little way above £100 though.
Click to expand...

Ok what would you say for just over £100 then, just out of interest.

Thanks for yourtime.
 
7900GTO... But the 7600GT's a solid performer, now that it's dirt cheap. I bought one when it was expensive, and regret that a bit, but for under £100? Fantastic...
 
OC 7900GS. Faster than the 7600GT. More than enough to run BF2 with lots of eye candy.

OcUK GeForce 7900 GS 256MB GDDR3 TV-Out/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail (GX-042-OK) Price: £97.99 (£115.14 Including VAT at 17.5%)
 
Northwind said:
That's what's in our server/email machine here :) It's the 2mb version though ;)
Click to expand...

I used to have one of those back in the day... Paired with my Voodoo 2! Although mine was the 4MB version, get in! :D

But yeh, for around £100, I'd go for the 7600GT.. Unless you can afford an extra £40ish and get an X1800XT 256MB...
 
The Voodoo 1 we had in it finally died last year... My main PC died so I was playing Mechwarrior 2 : Mercenaries, and the poor old thing gave up the ghost. This is where I find out that an original Voodoo with all its manuals in working condition is worth about £1000, isn't it? :)
 
Northwind said:
The Voodoo 1 we had in it finally died last year... My main PC died so I was playing Mechwarrior 2 : Mercenaries, and the poor old thing gave up the ghost. This is where I find out that an original Voodoo with all its manuals in working condition is worth about £1000, isn't it? :)
Click to expand...


as funny as it sounds... there are some who will pay good money for boxed working voodoo cards :)
 
yeah my GF is using the 7600gt in her shuttle (amd64 [email protected] 2gbram) and is playing battlefield2142 maxed out at 1280 by 1024 smoothly, this game is def more ram and cpu based these days as most cards will run this game (bf2/2142) nicely. Hell even my mates rig (antlonXP2700 2GBram) and 6600 256mb agp run this game nicely though not at highs.
 
Also the HIS ATI Radeon X1650 Pro ICEQ Turbo 256MB GDDR3 is basically the x1600xt and my other mate (we're lan gamers) has two of them in crossfire and my GF's shuttle beats it hands down in every 'game' .... not '3dmark' so yeah unless you can streach your budget and dont play at high res the 7600gt rocks.
 
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