Video card purchasing assistance

[theglenlivet12]

After reading the guide in the stickies, Ive decided to go the nVidia route once again. However, there are so many manufacturers like EVGA and BFG and MSI. Anyone know of a link or care to clear up which of those are a good manufacturer of these cards?

[Totalheadache]

After reading the guide in the stickies, Ive decided to go the nVidia route once again. However, there are so many manufacturers like EVGA and BFG and MSI. Anyone know of a link or care to clear up which of those are a good manufacturer of these cards?

why nvidia? after testing all total wars with 295/285 and a 5870, 5870 is the best for me.

anyways i would say 285 done by evga/xfx/inno/bfg are good brands. still for me 5870 v 285 is a no-brainer.

[karamazovmm]

Seriously why Nvidia? They have the reputation to sell you the same product with different prices for 3 years, and they did it again the entire line of GT 300 are rebrandings, seriously why Nvidia?

[theglenlivet12]

Price point at this time would prohibit me from going all the way up to a 295. Im overhauling my mobo, CPU, HD, cooling system and power supply as well.

[theglenlivet12]

At the moment I have a 8800GT OC 512. Im just looking for a card that I wont have to run the housefan on to cool. (yes I literally have a small fan aimed at the open case onto my CPU and GPU)

[theglenlivet12]

If im gonna go with ATI, I was thinking around a 4870, but I dont know if that would be much of an improvement. Whaddya think? HIS or Sapphire?

[karamazovmm]

I think you should buy something that is actually new, go for the 5850 good bang for the buck

[theglenlivet12]

Cant do it mate. That puts me well over what I have budgeted for this project.

[Oberbefehlshaber]

Yeah, dont waste your money on Nvidia. Get a 5850 like he said, or if you can afford it and your case is big enough, get a 5870. If you dont want to spend alot of money get a 5770 for about $160, the performance for a 5770 is still more than enough to run NTW on Ultra. Plus all these cards run DirectX 11, Nvidia does not. A 5770 is the best performing card for the money on the market in my opinion.

[karamazovmm]

then go for the 5770

[Spaxspore]

I think you should buy something that is actually new, go for the 5850 good bang for the buck

AGreed!!!

Get XFX 5850 , cause it has lifetime warranty.

Edit,

Ok if u cant afford a 5850, 4870 is a good choice.

[karamazovmm]

5770 is still a better buy, and they're almost the same price

[Spaxspore]

Crap keep forgettin about the 5770, i concur with MM

[theglenlivet12]

Okay I went with the xfx 5770. Tested it out on ultra with aa at 4 and as at 16x. Ran rather smoothly. My old card ran ultra fine but choked if I had aa on at all. Gonna test the flight sim later.

[moopere]

Come on guys - the religious wars between ATI/AMD and Nvidia will never end, but there are very good reasons to buy Nvidia based GPU's revolving mainly around driver maturity and lack of 'weird' stuff (like not using AA). One brand is not better than another, or at least it can't be sanely argued. The OP clearly wanted an Nvidia card, could we focus on that rather than trying to change his 'religion'?

With that in mind, to the OP I'd say, if your budget can afford it, stick with a big brand card. Gigabyte, ASUS for instance. The XFX, BFG, etc, cards are almost always significantly cheaper or offer tempting upgrades (more memory for same price) but almost without exception I've had problems with build quality and RAM quality on the cheaper brands. This might not matter if you change your card every 6-12 months, but I tend to buy mid-high end and keep my cards for 2 years or so. These things produce a -lot- of heat these days and poor builds won't last the distance.

The GTX 260 is reasonably priced, not on the crest of the pricing wave, and performs similarly to other cards mentioned in this thread.

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/vi...eForce+GTX+260

Best regards, Moopere

[karamazovmm]

there is no maturity in terms of drivers from any company, both companies currently have issues running ntw or any other game, you decide based on what are your priorities, money and fps, sometimes people only go for nvidia for the name of it.

[theglenlivet12]

Damn. I just bought an XFX card and went from a BFG card

After gaming for a few hours now, I can tell you the housefan is back on the case. I am thinking of returning the card since the only change I was really able to make was to enable 2X AA which is purely negligible and I cant justify spending a couple hundred bucks for that small an increase. However, I did play COH for the first time in all of its DX10 glory which I wasnt able to do smoothly with my old card. Im gonna test out FSX next and see how it looks.

Im starting to wonder now if the bottleneck is actually in my HD. I havent updated it since I built this PC 5 years ago. The light seems to be on too often and it seems to be thinking a little too hard for some of the apps I open up. Other than that, Im using a p5K Deluxe Wifi mobo and a E8400 Wolfdale chip so I dont really think theres any problems there.

Also, I believe cooling to be an issue.

[karamazovmm]

dxdiag, and download msi afterburner and speed fan for checking some temps

[theglenlivet12]

Gonna run speedfan with my housefan off and see what I get.

[theglenlivet12]

Okay so I ran speedfan. I found that really at no time did the temps break 45 degrees. Odd. But I did see some 'perks' of an ATI card. And it was actually rather hilarious. I turned off AA in the middle of a battle with Spain. For some reason, it turned everyone into a ninja. Like they were all shadowed. And when youd zoom in, they'd look like they've all been burnt. Then, I ordered my cannon to fire on a routing unit. Two of the men ran like The Flash at the routing units. They literally crossed the battlefield in 5 seconds. It was kinda sweet.