Upgrade Advice

[Broken Arrow]

Hi guys,

I was hoping for some help on buying a reasonably cheap new graphics card for my pc:

P4 2.6Ghz running at 3.1Ghz
ASUS P4P800 motherboard
1GB RAM
Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB

It needs to be an AGP card as I don't want to upgrade my motherboard and price-wise I am aiming for about £130 though I will stretch up to £150 if it makes a significant difference.

From what I can make out so far (not having kept up with Graphics Cards in the last few years) I am probably looking at an X800 or stretching to a 6800GS. Any advice would be much appreciated.

Cheers,

Ian

 

[Xplo]

A 6800gs is your best bet if you can stretch, and want to buy new. Second hand you could get an x850xt pe for 140ish and ive seen 6800gt's go for 110.

 

[Broken Arrow]

Cheers - I definitely don't want the hassle of risking secondhand though.

Will the 6800GS outperform the X800 to a significant degree then?

And am I likely to run in to headaches switching between Ati and nVidia in terms of removing drivers, etc?

Ian

 

[ACESHIGH]

Cheers - I definitely don't want the hassle of risking secondhand though.

Will the 6800GS outperform the X800 to a significant degree then?

And am I likely to run in to headaches switching between Ati and nVidia in terms of removing drivers, etc?

Ian

The X850XT is faster than the 6800GS.

 

[oweneades]

The 6800GS is going to be your best option for AGP. (best bang for buck as people say).

Yes there are faster cards (X850XT as suggested above) however new these are above your budget.

 

[Broken Arrow]

Thanks for the advice guys.

I've now got my new BFG 6800 GS OC installed and everything is groovy except for some glitches in 3DMark03 - it all goes fine up until the Mother Nature test and then lots of texture glitches come in, particularly on the water. I then get what I understand to be tearing on the Trolls test and more glitchy textures on the Planes test.

I am running the 82.12 drivers from the disk and at stock speeds, my GPU temp is running at about 50 degrees.

I having a sneaking suspiscion it might be my rather old monitor (a CRT Viewsonic) which isn't helping as it only supports refresh rates of up to 60hz - could that be causing the problem or is it more likely to be driver/temperature related.

One last thing - I ran AtiTool to scan for artifacts and it couldn't find any despite my problems in 3DMark, not sure if that is relevant.

Cheers,

Ian