Maximum PC

I'm looking to get a different "budget" video card. I know that the 4800-series ATI cards are 2-3 years old, but I did manage to find a 4870 for $60 (new). It's only a 512MB GDDR5 card, but it would probably still meet my needs as I only play games occassionally on my PC (most other games I play are played on my PS3).

Anyway, I also found an HD5670 card (for about $90, which would give me DX11 support).

What are people's opinions of getting a 4800 series card that doesn't support DX11 versus a lower-end card that does? I'm on a budget here a little, and don't really want to spend much more than $100 for the card (not including tax).

Suggestions or ideas?

What's your monitor's resolution? What games do you want to be playing? What are the rest of the components in your system.

monitor's resolution is (I think) 1600x900 max resolution (so I think it's only capable of 720p anyway). as for the rest of the components, I'm running the following:

Core 2 Quad Q9550
4 GB of DDR2
Gigabyte P43 motherboard
has (1) PCi-Express x16 v2.0 slot

I have only a 500 watt PSU right now (Antec) but will probably be upgrading at some point.
The system is fairly lightly loaded, with only 2 SATA hard drives and (1) SATA DVD burner. It's not overclocked at all, so no extra power usage there.
And I"m running a standard air-cooling setup so no extra power is being used for cooling purposes other than a bout (4) 120mm fans.

As for the games I (plan) to play, well I've been trying to finish GTA-4, Fallout, and a few others. I may get Portal 2 when it comes out, and may try Crysis 2.

With that known, what is the recommendation? I know the 4870 is the MINIMUM that I see for Crysis (according to what I've seen around the Internet).

The reason I won't go all out and get a $300 video card is not because I can't afford it, honestly, but more that I need to justify such a purchase to myself. I play games on occasion, and not on a daily basis like some. I may play for a few hours a week, or maybe an hour a day or so, so I'm not really a "true" gamer according to most standards, but would like to be able to pick up a game and not have to worry about the game not playing because my video card is not powerful enough.

At least the re-assuring aspect is that if (and when) I do rebuild, I can take the PCI-E video card with me to the new system (which I don't plan to rebuild for at least nother year yet).

(FYI: My system was originall built for engineering, programming, and video transcoding work --not video editing or games-- so that's why my rig is somewhat plain.)

I guess I should correct something here...


I don't expect a $100 video card to be able to play games like Crysis 2 at high resolutions with high frame rates and all the eye candy enabled... that I know.

What I'm really after is a good card that cam play more modern games (maybe not the latest games, but games that are no more than 2 years old) at decent frame rates with a moderate level of graphics detail. I don't care about having the highest level of detail or 50+ frame rates in brand new games.

Basically in the end, I would like DX11 support, but if I can get a better performance-to-cost ratio with a 4000-series card with that being the primary pitfall, I guess it's not that bad anyway (plus how many games now take advantage of DX11 anyway)?

I would go with a Asus 5770 video card. They go for 139 bucks and it has a rebate that brings the price down to 119. You will get fair framerates plus DX11 for future games.

http://tinyurl.com/3qx6ulc

According to this, the 500 watt psu should run it:

http://tinyurl.com/2d7loo6

Nasty