Graphics Cards

DZwart

DZwart

Legacy of Elijah Officer
so my nVidia 7600GT 256MB DDR3 seems to be malfunctioning - I think it's bad sectors in the memory on the card.

I want to replace it as cheaply (looking forward to 1wk unemployment) as possible with a minor upgrade and I'd prefer to stay with nVidia so I don't need to monkey with the drivers.

I'm looking at a couple cards on newegg.

My understanding is that PCI-Express 2.0 x16 is compatible with PCI-Express x16.

Here's two of the cards I was looking at tonight:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814187036
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814187037

There were a few different brands too, but both of these had decent user reviews. The difference in these two was memory (512 vs 1024) and $5. It's been so long since I've spent any serious time looking at cards, I don't know much about the current series. Any suggestions?
 
Sorry, should have known to give more stats:

Intel Core 2 Duo E6400
ECS P965T-A (V1.0) LGA 775 Intel P965 Express ATX Intel Motherboard
OCZ Platinum Revision 2 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) - some sort of interference with the mobo - got sick of dealing with it after 2 rma's so only using 1 stick
Windows Vista Home Premium

My next upgrade will be RAM, but it's barely even usable with the current vid card.
 
many motherboards won't run more than 1 2 gig sticks at ddr2 800. YOu need to re3search your board to make sure it can actually do that.

Secondly on your video card...I don't know what psu you have..but anything by nividia 9xxx to know has defects in manufacturing leading to a high failure rate. If you are truly set on nvidia then go for the 9600 at a minimum. The 95 and 94 are severaly choped in their memory buses and you will pay for it in performance.

I would go ATI right now and on the ati site i would reccomend the hd 4670. If you ahve a bit more scratch then head to the 4850 provided you ahve at least a 400w PSU for the 4850. you'll need at least 350 for any new card these days..with 400 being hte best bet.
 
Power supply is 500W, so no worries there. I have a friend I used to work with who bought the same mobo, so I'll have to hit him up or dig up whatever documentation I have once I'm ready to upgrade RAM.
 
Many times, card manufacturers will put more memory onto a card purely for marketing purposes. Actual performance has more to do with out much a given GPU can process per second than memory bandwidth. If the cards can't process more than "512mb worth of stuff", which is likely the case, the extra memory won't be helping you. There are other factors that can come into play, such as frame rate, size of textures/levels, etc, that might even cause one card to perform better on a one game, and perform not as good on another.

Long story short, there preobably isn't much of a difference, but if you really want to be frugal - check benchmarks for the cards to compare.
 
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