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New GPU Advice

b0ng0

b0ng0

b0ng0

Associate
Joined
5 Jul 2005
Posts
68
Hello there folks!

It's about time for an upgrade, as my current PC can't quite cut the gaming mustard these days. I haven't really paid much attention to new hardware for a while so I'm a bit out of touch and terribly confused by all the new fangled naming systems (and I was really looking forward to the GeForce 10,000 series ).

My currect specs are:

• Operating system: Windows 2.5.1.2600 (SP 3)
• CPU type: Intel(R) Pentium(R) Dual CPU E2220 @ 2.40GHz
• CPU Speed (GHz): 2.42
• System memory (GB): 1.998 (DDR2)
• Graphics card model: NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT 256MB OC

Now I'm not looking to upgrade everything, I'm only really wanting a boost in the gaming department, only really wanting to spend around £100. I thought I'd post all the specs just incase they would potentially bottleneck a new GPU.

Thanks in advance for any advice offered.
 
I don't think it's a good time to upgrade your graphic card if you want to spend £100 only. Anyways your CPU would bottleneck quite everything worth attention out there so it's better to save now and look for some decent CPU plus graphic cards' price drops.
 
Thanks for the advice.

I know my system isn't the best but I'm also not in the habbit of running games maxed out, just so long as it looks nice and has a decent FPS then I'm happy.

Are the ATi 4870 and nVidia 250 quite comparable in terms of performance? I've heard that ATi have better mid-range cards these days (the only one i've owned was in a laptop and that melted...)
 
Owenb said:
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/HIS/HD_5770/30.html

Those charts will give you a good comparsion between all cards that you should be considering.
Click to expand...

Thanks.

In terms of my CPU being a little low-end (compared to the beasts you can buy today), I can probably overclock it a fair bit to compensate as it's running at stock speeds just now, I just never felt the need to OC it (I think CPC guys managed to get it up to 3 GHz, aircooled).
 
b0ng0 said:
Thanks.

In terms of my CPU being a little low-end (compared to the beasts you can buy today), I can probably overclock it a fair bit to compensate as it's running at stock speeds just now, I just never felt the need to OC it (I think CPC guys managed to get it up to 3 GHz, aircooled).
Click to expand...

I wouldn't worry about it been too much of a bottleneck for a £100 gpu. The 4870 is only a small bit faster than a 8800gtx which was released 3 years ago.
 
Going to bed now. Heres some info I dug up on the power consumption for each card. (Make sure you do some research yourself, my stuff was pulled together in a couple of minutes and shouldnt be taken as 100% accurate.)

THIS IS THE GRAPH I USED TO GET MY RESULTS

Current: 8600 GT : 52w draw

Prospective: GTX250 : 110-158w Draw
Prospective: 4870 : 139-187w Draw

The power consumption is pretty high, so I would double check you have enough PSU meat to power these new cards.
 
HD 4770 has quite a low power draw (will probably work on decent 350w PSUs, assuming you dont have a crazy overclocked CPU or lots of drives) and gives quite good performance.

Second hand, probably could pick one up very cheap.

edit:

Performance per watt

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/HIS/HD_5770/31.html

Outperforms everything but the hd5xxx cards.
 
Last edited:
I have a 450W Tagan Whisper PSU.

Would I see much of a performance jump from the 4870 to the 5750 based on my CPU and RAM?
 
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