Maximum PC

Hi, so I'm looking for a new videocard. I'm running a
Intel pentium D 2,8 Ghz.
2x DDR2 2gb 800 Mhz.
Right now I have a ATI Radeon HD 3400. And well all I can say is that this card is a joke. Some time ago I had only 1gb of ram. And well the games were running slow, but I used to blame it on the lack of ram. So I got some more and well, the performance improved a little but not much. For example I can't run The Saboteur at 1024X768 on low graphic settings. The game just seems slow.

The new card should be around 200-300$. I was looking at a
VGA GF 9800GT 512MB DDR3, for about 200$. I don't have a clue if it will work with my DDR2 ram though. And perhaps there's a better card for the money? I really don't know much about videocards.
Hope the post wasn't too long, anyways I'm looking forward to your replies.
Cheers!

To be honest man, it would be a better investment to scrap that PC.

If your willing to spend $300 on a new video card, spend double that and get a decent gaming rig. MaxPc has an article about building a good gaming Pc for a little of $600 dollars on there main site.

I am sure for the mid $500's you can go through and retailer and get a better rig then what you have now. It's not everyone's thing, but it will perform better then what a new graphics card will in your current rig.

Thanks for the quick reply.Okay, so the CPU is the problem correct?
So Could I consider just changing my cpu, motherboard and the videocard. I actually don't know much about motherboards, so I don't have a clue if replacing it would make any difference.
I still could use the other parts from my computer, reducing the costs.

AMD Athlon II X4 620 100$
Sapphire Radeon HD 5770 190$
Gigabyte GA-MA74GM-S2 70$
=360 $
I just quickly calculated the prices from my local currency to dollars.

Would this work? Any other tips perhaps?

If you just play games, you can get a 2.8Ghz Athlon II X3, which is faster for games and cheaper.

Looks like that should work, just make sure you're getting the latest revision for that motherboard. IMHO, stick with the quad-core CPU as more games are starting to get CPU-bound.

That videocard is the problem too. It only has 4 pipelines and very slow memory. If you jump upto a 4650 (soon to be a 5600 series) it would be 4x the graphical power. The cpu is kinda slow too, but yeah the graphics card you have now can play tf2 @ 1280x720 at minimum settings and that is about it.

while that's true, there are very few optimized for quad-core. I mean, can you name ten games that use four CPU cores? I can name... one- Stormrise is the only one I can think of. So while the Athlon II X4 has more raw power, at least one, and probably two of the cores will sit there useless even in CPU-bound games, in which case the Athlon II X3's .2Ghz clock advantage will give it the edge.

FarCry2 is very veyr multi core friendly. WoW can also make use of 4 cores. I'm not sure, but I believe CoD:MW2 does aswell.

Don't forget Grand Theft Auto IV

The game will play on a dual core, but plays the best on a quad core.

ok... that's 4, plus one maybe. Still not 10. See my point? This is coming from a gamer who owns a quad-core. Hardly any of my games load up more then two cores. It really helps for transcoding though.

There are others, we simply mentioned the ones that we know of off the top of our heads. After some looking, I've found DoWII is als capable of using 4 cores, shows good gains over 2 core. The list will only get bigger as dev start to take advantage of the fact moe machines are shipping with multi core setups.

that's what they've been saying for years. call me a cynic, but I don't believe games are going to become more quad-core optimized any time soon.

Difference here is that now Intel is shipping and selling mass quanities of Dual and Quad core setups where as back then, only AMD really had Dual core setups. You dont dev an app for 20% of the market unless your making an app for large business or enterprise systems where dual and quad core system/clusters are found. Game Devs dont sell to Large Business or enterprises, the sell to consumers and only in the last 18 months has the vast majority of machines being sold to that market have been dual or quad based setups. its a case of the Game Devs following the market influezes such as Intel/AMD/ATI/Nvidia rather than leading them.

You can add Dirt 2 to the list, most significant boost is shown going from dual to triple core, but there is a boost when using 4 cores as well.

source: Toms

Allright. The weird thing is that all I'm seeing is ATI cards. For a maximum budget of 300$ the ati 5700 series would be best right? But what about nvidia cards? Are they simply out of the price range?

Fixed that for you. No offense.

Sorry to thread jack a bit. Pet Peeve.

No, for 300 bucks, if you search hard enough you can find GTX260s for sure under 200, GTX275 between 200 and 300 and if your lucky a GTX 285 for around 300. Fermi based DX11 cards are due in March it seems so only ATI right now has DX11 cards. and a 5850 should be in your price range of 300, but your current setup will be a bottle neck to any current Nvidia card or any current or last gen ATI card for the highend Nvidia/ATI last gen(GTX260/275/285/295 or 4850/4870/4890) or midrange/highend ATI current gen(5750/5770/5850/5870/5970)

I'll add another one: FSX





Ted

5850's are above $300 again...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814134086

nvidia gtx275