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

 

[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

 

[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