graphic card Advise for purchasing new graphic card

[Shane Ekanayake]

i currently own 9500GT .im planing to upgrade my graphic card

my price range is $100 . any recommended cards???

:)

[+Gary7 Subscriber²]

There is not many decnt Cards for that $100.00. Maybe a 9800GTX. Nope, they are even more.

[DR3AMxCATCHER]

You won't get anything good for $100. You'll be needing to push around $200. Best bet, save your money.

[PGHammer]

You won't get anything good for $100. You'll be needing to push around $200. Best bet, save your money.

Please - not everyone wants to buy a GPU that uses more power than the rest of the PC put together.

There are a few good cards in the $100 range - or are you calling the GTS450 *wimpy*?

There are no less than eight GTS450 cards under $120USD at Newegg. (There is one from Galaxy for $99.99USD, even.)

AMD equivalent is the HD6750 (same price range, even).

[DR3AMxCATCHER]

I admit, my mistake. I just believe in its best to save your money and make the best investment.

[Ntrstd]

Please - not everyone wants to buy a GPU that uses more power than the rest of the PC put together.

There are a few good cards in the $100 range - or are you calling the GTS450 *wimpy*?

There are no less than eight GTS450 cards under $120USD at Newegg. (There is one from Galaxy for $99.99USD, even.)

AMD equivalent is the HD6750 (same price range, even).

For a given GPU some cards are twice as fast as others.

If a game is slow, it's because of the graphics card and GPU. Not usually because of the CPU. So I say, spend a bit extra and get as powerful a card as the computer can use. But I can't see much point in spending more than $200 unless there are excessive requirements. Will it handle Battlefield 3 or COD4 with all of the settings maxed?

[PGHammer]

For a given GPU some cards are twice as fast as others.

If a game is slow, it's because of the graphics card and GPU. Not usually because of the CPU. So I say, spend a bit extra and get as powerful a card as the computer can use. But I can't see much point in spending more than $200 unless there are excessive requirements. Will it handle Battlefield 3 or COD4 with all of the settings maxed?

You mean a given game - not necessarily a given GPU.

And I was referring to modern games, including BF3 and MW3 in particular.

How well a CPU/GPU combination depends on how well the game is written to play to the strengths of each.

Burnout Paradise, despite its age, makes the point reasonably well. With the same GPU, you have to settle for 1280x720 (if not less) on a single-core (even with HyperThreading) CPU, such as the P4 Northwood-C or early S478 Prescotts - or even the LGA775 Prescott P4s, despite their x64 compatibility. With dual-core CPUs (as old as the dual-core Athlon64, Sempron, Turion, even the Celeron-D/Pentium-D) you can reasonably scale to 1680x1050. However, with as old a quad-core as the Q6600, 1920x1080 at medium detail or taller is easily workable - even with as weak a GPU as my AMD HD5450 - which is a notebook GPU that has crossed over for basic desktop duties. Basically, BP is heavily - if not entirely - CPU-bound.

Newer games put more strain on the GPU than the CPU (when well-written) - when poorly-written, all the CPU and GPU horsepower on the planet is of little help (Rage is a prime example).

If a game requires anything over HD67xx when teamed with a quad-core from either Intel or AMD, then something is seriously screwed up with the game's coding.