New Graphics Card

[the.ultimate.maverick]

Okay,

I'm looking for a new graphics card. Due to a max price (£300 including TAX) I want to spend, I found this card, a 5'12Mb Gainward BLISS 7900GT Dual DVI "Golden Sample"'.
It boasts :
GPU Speed: 550 MHz
Memory: 512Mb
Memory Bit Rate: 256 Bit
Memory Type: GDDR3
Memory Speed: 1400 MHz

Now - this might not be the best so can any of you that have seen a better deal for a PCI card for under £300 please post here!

[lonelyjew]

Maverick what are you using now? If you think your current card can hold you over for another 6 months or so don't bother with a 7900gt unless you can turn it back in for a newer card.

I say this because windows vista is coming out soon with DX10 which isn't supported by any cards these days. By the end of the year though the nvidia 8 seriers should come out and they will be DX10 compatible. It would be a shame to spend $300 only to find your card obsolete in a few months.

I can't wait for the new cards and DX10 to come out, cryisis looks amazing.

[Gaz]

woooaahhh. Hang on mate. I spent 350 quid on a Gainward 6800 Ultra GC, and had nothing but problems with it. No official support, and when I got a replacement, it was just as bad. Had to get a mate to hack the card BIOS to get it to work at 80% of what it should

Think twice about a Gainward GC.

[Hitperson]

wait for the DX10. yeah i do know it needs its of windows certified mother board but that is one awsome card.

[JellyBelly]

£300 on a graphics card?! I wish I had £300 to burn, although It wouldn't be going on PC clobber.

[the.ultimate.maverick]

So le advice is wait until end of year?!

[Dark Ewok]

Will you be able to get one of them shiny new DX10 certified cards for £300?
Even so, that's still a load of cash and I wish I had 1/10:th of that to squander on PC upgrades.

[solipsism]

Um dont wait.. DX10 cards will be nice, I will be getting one as soon as they are available. But i will also be getting a conroe(new Intel, they will be the cpu kings until next cycle, although im a huge AMD fan) to comlpiment the DX10 card. But the dx10 card should really be part of a complete upgrade.

Check out EVGA, even if your arent a resident of the USA, you can still be part of the trade up deal, I was. If a new card comes out in 90 days thats better then yours, even if yours isnt the very best, you can send in yours and pay the difference. Thats how i moved up from 2x EVGA 7800GTX 256 to 2x EVGA 7800GTX512.

If you are thinking of gettin ga dx10 card, then maybe get a 7900 gt, the price just dropped on all 7900 cards today. If i was buying a card today i would buy the ATI x1900xl 512 soley for the reason that you can use HDR (high dynamic range) and FSAA at the same time. Sadly you cannot do this with any nvidia card, and with HDR being used in more and more games, this will be an issue.


EVGA and BFG (afaik) both have transferrable lifetime warranties, which means that you can sell your card on ebay and it still has warranty, i have heard that BFGs is limited to 1 or 2 resells though, all though i read this long ago and am not 100% on that. I know that they Both have lifetime warranty though. For nvidia i would stick with teh big 3 EVGA, BFG, XFX. For ATI i would go with Saphire, ATi, or maybe powercolor, but i personally dont like Powercolor cause they come off as cheap.

Also remember that if you get ATI for having FSAA + HDR at the same time you will need to get the best card (X1900XT/L) they have because HDR + FSAA hogs alot of resources, so even though the lower cards (x1xx) can do HDR + FSAA, doesnt mean they will run very fast. Games like FEAR also have significant improvements in performance over NVIDIA thanks to ATIs original architecture.

If you have any other questions i can post some handly links for you to read or answer some questions myself, as i keep tabs on the computer hardware front.

Also pay attention to HDMI, although ATI and NVIDIA cards say their cards are HDMI compatible (you do want your expensive toy to work uncompressed with HDTV's right?), the resellers (ie: evga, saphire, etc) havent enabled it yet. A few cards are just starting to hit the market with this feature, but they are the cheaper, less-gaming powerful cards. Soon HDMI-enabled versions of every card should be hitting the market.

If you do not know what HDMI is, Its a sort of Hardware based copywrite DRM protection. Basically it works like this. Lets say you have a brand new HD-DVD or BLU-RAY dvd player or High end graphics card, and you have an HDTV or 24" Dell widescreen or something similar. HDMI is another way just like S-VIDEO, Composite (RCA), Component cable to trasmit video from your source (PC, Hi-def dvd player) to your HDTV/LCD monitor. Now if you use these sources without using HDMI, say using s-video, you are only going to get 25% of your resolution. Only with HDMI you will get 100% of you 720p/1080i + picture quality. Now with teh first batch of HD-DVDs the studios havent turned this "feature" on yet. But they can at any time, it is as easy for them as uploading the data to your computer/dvd player (new dvd players have ethernet) as an update, or simply including it on a dvd disc, and installing without you knowing. So its a good thing to know.

This also goes for HDTVs that dont have HDMI, so basically what the movie companies are saying to the early adopters of HDTVs/large pc lcds that dont have HDMI is screw you, even though you have a perfectly fine tv/lcd you need to buy a new one just to use this damned cable.


ONE LAST THING: What kind of monitor are you using? If you are using a resolution limited LCD which can only display 1280x1024, you do not need a high end card as most of the difference in high end cards are in the higher resolutions (1600x1200+) and you may be paying for something you wont even see for 6-12 months in advance. OTOH If you have something like a dell 2405fpw (2407fwp) 24" ws monitor you can scale the resolution to whatever you like, although it only looks best in 1920x1200 for that particular monitor. All lcds only look like they were designed to on one resolution. If you have CRT just ignore this. Btw crts still have better quality video then LCD, no matter what your friends and local computer/tv stores like you to think, its too bad its so hard to find a good CRT nowdays.
EDITED for corrections.

[the.ultimate.maverick]

Thanks for the long informative post - I have decided to go out and buy a new card though now as, after a bit of thought, I decided the DirectX 10 will probably be released with an update for 9.0c and this will give some backwards compatability.

Plus I read that you will only need D10 card for vista - and i'm not getting that piece of ****!

So - now we get back to the question at heart - what card do I go for?!

[Hitperson]

i'm saving up more for one of these.


at least i want to save for one of those.