7600gt

[jbharris]

im new to the gfx scene, i have a geforce 5200 which sucks. Ive asked a few people what card i should upgrade to and they said the best one i could get for my PC would be a 7600gs, but ive seen around that the 7600gt is better. is there anyway i can findout if i can use a 7600gt?

 

[semi-pro waster]

I'm assuming that you are using AGP here(an FX5200 pretty much guarantees it) so you could get an AGP 7600gt but they aren't particularly cheap, you might be better going for a secondhand X800series card or 6800series card which should cost somewhere from ~£50-80 and offer a huge jump in performance.

If you could list the rest of your specification including PSU then that would probably help determine if an upgrade is worthwhile.

 

[jbharris]

my psu is 250W

 

[John11]

i got a leadtek A7600 GT a month back i had to rma it back cos it was faulty but i got a new one back fantastic card jumped from 400 points on 3dmark06 on my athlon xp 2700+ to 2900 points on 3dmark06 the card was about £135 quid well worth the money and you need at least 400w psu to run it so that 250w psu you have will never run it

 

[jbharris]

i do have enough to get a PSU upgrade if it will help

 

[LoadsaMoney]

Id go for the 7600 GT if you can afford it, fantastic card for the price, its faster than the 6800 Ultra, so it will blow your 5200 away in performance.

 

[jbharris]

so i can use it with a 250w psu?

 

[semi-pro waster]

Id go for the 7600 GT if you can afford it, fantastic card for the price, its faster than the 6800 Ultra, so it will blow your 5200 away in performance.

I'm not convinced that it offers that great value for money, it is around £140 on here for an AGP version and while it is faster than a 6800ultra I don't think it is is, or ever has been, £60 faster. I haven't looked at the benchmarks for quite a while but is it not in the region of only a few frames faster on most games?

The PSU upgrade is probably worthwhile but if you bought the PC from a systems integrator then you might find that you are unable to upgrade it easily as they sometimes use non-standard connectors.

 

[The Boxer]

Hi

JB, the answer is NO, your 250 psu will never ever cope with these cards, a good 500 watter is fine, you may get away with less (450), but whats the point for a few quid, give yourself some headroom to spare, you may upgrade again and you don't want to be changing psu's every time, of interest my enermax 350ish watter would not run my 6800gt agp at all on games, just coped with 2 D stuff.

Regards T B'er

 

[chimaera]

I would've thought any decent brand PSU over 400W would be more than enough in a Celeron setup, 500W seems like overkill to me, the OP obviously isn't a hardcore upgrader so the extra power seems a bit pointless.

If you've managed with a 5200 for this long then a 7600GS and medium power PSU would give you a nice gaming boost.

Not knowing how much RAM you have, anything less than 1GB would bottleneck the graphical performance so it might be worth saving a little bit on the graphics card and PSU to put towards some RAM.

 

[jbharris]

i do have plans to get more ram aswell as a card. And a PSU now

 

[jbharris]

here is my shopping list,

CA-017-OC
GX-088-LT
MY-030-CR

 

[semi-pro waster]

here is my shopping list,

CA-017-OC
GX-088-LT
MY-030-CR

Give us a clue here, I know I don't memorise OcUK order codes

If that is a PSU then make sure it is a decent brand of 400w or above, memory will have to be DDR and you know about the graphics card.

 

[jbharris]

490 watt PSU (i think, its that or above anyway)
1gig DDR
7600 GT

 

[banja]

The Leadtek site says this for the 7600gt AGP.

"** A minimum recommended 300W system power supply required."

I would think they'd err on the side of caution too. I've heard these cards are the lowest power hungry cards since before 6*** series, so a good quality PSU with over 22amps on the 12v rail, in a PC that doesn't have 6 hard drives etc should, in theory, be fine.

 

[mrthingyx]

so i can use it with a 250w psu?

You might be able to. It all depends on how butch the amperage ratings on the pertninent rails are. Basically, a high quality 250W PSU is better than a rubbish 1Gigawatt PSU. Believe it or not. The chances are, however, that any system built around a Celeron will - unfortunately - be rubbish, so the power supply could probably do with a refresh. But don't go buying one that can power your house - there is no need, whatsoever. But a 350W PSU from the likes of Seasonic/Antec or Enermax and you will never have a problem with that system.

Too much is made of PSUs at this point in time. Considering a Core 2 Duo Xtreme and a quad SLi rig (and even a regular Crossfire rig) can be run on a 550-odd PSU, sticking a 7600GT into a system with a 250W PSU.

I clearly remember ATi and Nvidia telling me to have AT LEAST 350W to power my XP2000 and Radeon 9700Pro. Considering I can run an XP2800 and a 9800Pro on a 250W SFF PSU, I'd say they were allowing for people with rubbish computer components.

 

[semi-pro waster]

I clearly remember ATi and Nvidia telling me to have AT LEAST 350W to power my XP2000 and Radeon 9700Pro. Considering I can run an XP2800 and a 9800Pro on a 250W SFF PSU, I'd say they were allowing for people with rubbish computer components.

This is true, they are covering themselves by inflating the ratings but SFF PSUs are also usually very efficient and in some ways not directly comparable to a normal desktop PSU, for a start on something like a Shuttle they are dealing with components that draw a known amount of power. If you have an ordinary PC system and plug in any random motherboard then it is in effect an unknown value because the manufacturer has to make it work for any possible motherboard along with the various components, in a Shuttle there are a very limited amount of motherboards you could possibly fit and by extension a comparatively limited number of components.