Best recommened Graphics card
 

Hi,
I'm looking to play Cliffs of Dover on high/max(ambitious but rubbish i'm assuming sadly...) settings. Sadly, my Dell Dimension 9200 came with a Nvidia GeForce 8800GTX, and that just isn't good enough.
So what replacement card should I get to play this game on high/max settings? My budget is £0-80, the card has to be 1GB or above and my PSU is 375 Watts, although I have heard 400 watt cards can run on it. I was looking at an ATi Radeon 6770 and a GeForce GTX 550, but if there's any better cards out there please let me know or pick the best one out of those two. Thanks! :grin:

A

*I will also be playing FSX, KSP and Il-2 1946 and will genrally use this PC as a gaming machine, so try and recommend a card for overall use and not just Il-2 CoD.

*I also found a list of cards that will fit inside my machine. Please can anybody tell which is the best out of these PLUS which will set me up for the future:
GeForce GTX 550 Ti
Radeon HD 7770
Radeon HD 7750
Radeon HD 6850
Radeon HD 6770
Radeon HD 6750

fortunatly for you, i have tested both those cards 550 and 6770, with a i5 2500k and a 8Gb DDR3 system.... unfortonatly neither one of those cards pulled a satisfactory result, they both stick to very good fps in lower settings (70+fps easely with medium/low shadows off) but stutters too much to be playable.

Anyway, the 550 is very much superior to the 6770.

For OVERRAL use, i can highly recommend the 550 for NOW. this card can run BF3 on high/ultra settings with no problems, and il2 1946 runs easily.

6770 will settle for similar performance to the 550, with graphics on medium in BF3, and will have no problem with 1946.

FOR COD use, i wouldnt recommend anything below the 560, and a 2GB card seeems to be mandatory. SO with that budget... i dotn think yo ucan pull it. :(

Pheraps a 2gb version of the 6850 is the best you can get, with will probably be worst on OVERRAL than the 550, but ti will be better for COD due to the 2 gb memory

D:
Damn. Was looking forward to playing this...
What would be the cheapest card that would play Il-2: CoD well then?

I edidted my post.... i think a 2 gb version of the 6850 would pull it off.

otherwise check for anything better than a 560 or a 7850, 2 GB versions should be a priority! OS you are looking at 200 euro GPU (150£ ?) other than that, you will need a good CPU and Memory too :S.... so i dont no... you ar efacing a 500 euro upgrade at least.

But would it fit inside my machine and would it work on a 375 watt power supply? ( I can't afford both)

i dont know.

anyway waht are your other specs? i think that even with a new GPU, you wont be able too pull it off with your current machine ...

The 6850 is...slightly outdated, but what would be the cheapest card to run it at a high/medium setting? (excluding the card list)

My specs? uuuhhh....
*coughcough I haven't powered the machine up yet coughcoguchgough*
my video cable comes on Monday/ Tuesday. But the machine's previous owner has probably modded it (I won't mention who) to become better, But I can tell you it's Intel Core Duo 2 and runs XP/ Vista (A sticker on the front says XP, a sticker ontop says Vista...WHY U NO PICK ONE OS) and probably has 4GB RAM. Maybe.I can get back to you as soon as I power it up. Stay tuned. Please.

Sorry mate... not goign to pull it off. You will just need to invest at least some 700 euros in a new pc. Even with the best GPU possible, your CPU/RAM will bottlenexk your preformance.

you will need a quad core... and not just any quadcore, an i5 2500k ist the best choice, and 6-8 GB of RAM, DDR3.

Sorry, but buying a GPU and COd for that PC would just be a frustration pot.

Bledd-*Head-desk* the system I get give and it won't cut the mustard... And I can't buy a new machine because..well..I'm not rich(Sadly).Anyway thanks for your help, I think I was a litttttttttle too ambitious with everything. BUT could you recommend me a graphics card that would sort me out for the future (1GB/2GB/3GB+) even if I can't play CoD? Also I hope Il-2 1946 still has a community because I think I'll have to settle with that as my Combat game..Le sigh..

Also I might find that this modded PC could have more memory than I last thought...would it enable me to get onto the ladder if it had anything above 4GB RAM? Or would I need to grab another processor aswell?

it does have a community. I dont know, but a 6770 is a cheap option and its the one who better matches the rest of your PC. a 6850 is clearly beter, but it also more expensive. a 550 i think its just not worth it.

EDIT:

you wont find more than 4 GB of ram. 4GB is the limit for that MOBO.

I've found a GeForce GT 640 within my budget and it's pretty small so I know it'll fit within my machine and It fits well within my PSU. Would that be a worthy buy for my system and would it fit me for the future and work well with everything I want it to work with? Or would I need a Dedicated Graphics chip for it?

im not familair with that GPU. ive never bothered to research specs below the Nvidea X50 series and the ATI X7XX series

It's a 2GB card that checks the boxes for PSU, size and fits just into my budget (£8 I can scavenge somehow). Everyday when I do a bit of research into what GPu replacement I want and I seem to end up with a different card everyday. So i think I might settle on the Gt 640..If you can recommend a better 2GB card before Tuesday (maybe Wednesday if the video card comes late) then please do, but even if it doesn't make a difference, I'll post my specs anyway.

*http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showthread.php?t=32011
Does this mean the card is actually rubbish? I couldn't make sense of it.

I think a 1gb 6850 is your best bet.
It's a good bit faster than a 550ti, especially at resolutions above 1680 x 1050 and equally important... it draws about the same power as your 8800GTX (slightly less) and also only uses 1 6-pin PCI-E connector.
So if your 8800GTX runs stable under max load so should the 6850.
Here's an online shop which has a 83£ deal on a MSI 1GB 6850 OC
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/search...d=&search=6850

I've dug a bit and seems there are people who have plugged a quadcore q6600 or q6700 (higher ones won't work) into their dimension 9200, but they aren't officially supported.
You will be cutting it very close PSU-wise though since the C2D has a TDP of 65 Watt ,while the C2Q is 105W..combine this with a graphics card which draws quite a bit of power, compared to your PSU rating, and you could well run into trouble.
Dell generally rate their PSU's pretty well, but if you need to upgrade the GPU,CPU and PSU you might aswell save a while longer and build a new budget PC.


edit : I'd forget about the 640..it seems to perform pretty bad from the one review i can find and is mostly intended for HTPC's or mini PC's
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...ew,3214-3.html
That is if a 6850 physically fits in your Dell, which is something I didn't look into!

Arganaut... just remembered if you are on XP, you probably are on 32 bit, so you might as well forget a 2 GB GPU


the 6850 is the best buy, i think the 640 is NOT a gaming GPU so you will face lots of problems with that.

Thanks for your advice, I think that card looks very good and right for me. To prevent me yet again finding another card tommorrow, I'll favourite that site and leave it. Btw, I didn't catch a few of your abbriations, so i'll list the ones I didn't understand:
C2Q
C2D
TDP

I don't know the CPU yet and it could very well be upgraded since I don't know what it is...but once the graphics card is purchased I'll have to wait for some money to buy a new PSU, then a new CPU unless I overclock it somehow (Idk how to do that).
But it was a case of "here's a new machine for YOU to have which you can upgrade if you need to" as previously I had to share a computer that I wasn't allowed to upgrade..
Also will this card fit into my machine?
(Going to be offline for awhile but I will come back, just don't expect a response immediately)

The thing about graphics card numbers is that the first one is the year or series. So on that basis a GT 640 is probably better than a GT 540, but quite probably worse than a GT 550, though depending on how much progress the GPU maker made between the series GT 5xx and GT 6xx maybe not. You can depend on a say GT 610 being worse than a GTX 580, or even a GTX 480, but when it gets to a GTX 280 you have to look it up, in this case the GTX 280 would be considerably stronger, but IIRC there was no GTX 180.

Radeons are somewhat similar, a HD 7970 will be better than a HD 6970, but a HD 7870 is pretty similar, a HD7850 will be less powerful, and a 76xx will be much weaker.

This site seems to be useful:

http://www.gpureview.com/database.php

Please note that laptop GPUs use different but similar naming systems, typically laptop graphic cards are desktop graphic cards with higher numbers attached.

I see what you mean, thanks.
When I power the system up I'll see what specs there is, then I'll have to see what needs to be upgraded to play Il-2 CoD on it. (probably bleddy well everything :evil:) I can tell I'm gonna have to wait a while to upgrade everything, but since I don't want to buy a new PC to use, I suppose that's just how it'll go. I've still got FSX and Il-2:1946 to cart me along until I can finally play it, Or if by some chance an update comes around that somehow makes it able to run on my system...'dout it. Le sigh.

C2D= Intel Core 2 Duo, the processor your PC should have if it's still stock; dualcore.
C2Q= Intel Core 2 Quad, as the name implies a quadcore version of the Core 2 design
TDP = thermal design power ; the maximum powerdraw the item will use, measured in Watt (stock..once overclocked they tend to soar).


A 8800GTX is 10.5-11inches long ,while a 6850 should be ~9inches long.
So it should fit, barring any freak designs on the brand you own/buy.

This card requires a 500 Watt power supply, so how can it be my "best bet"? Please explain old chap.
Correction: now you've explained your abbriations I understand. Still abit risky...isn't there any other card which does equal high perfomance but with lower watt usage? I also won't be going down the route of buying a new PC, but i'll look into the card heat usage now.

Right I'm screwed. Courtesy of thebitech.net, they say the max power usage using their DMark06 Canyon Flight test, 1,280 x 1,024 is 229, combined with everything else =399 Watts. But like you said Warhound, if your 8800GTX runs stable under max load so should the 6850. Should I take the risk?

More info on their test:

Eventually then, we've decided to use 3DMark06's Canyon Flight test as a real world representative, repeatable graphics test. It's a ferociously demanding test, pushing graphics cards to their limit, but also containing peaks and troughs in performance that match real world game play.

As the test is so demanding and GPU limited, we've set 3DMark to run the test at 1,280 x 1,024 with 0xAA and 16xAF (enabled in the driver), constantly looping the test for thirty minutes and recording the maximum power consumption and GPU Delta T (the difference between the temperature of the GPU and the ambient temperature in our labs).

Would Cliffs of Dover push the card to it's very limit? Would I have to play this game 30 mins at a time? Would everything else I wanted to play push it to it's limits? I can see having to buy a new PSU in the future a neccessity, but before I manage to get a new one I might have to be very careful on how I play things. Could I get an external device to monitior the Wattage use? Maybe use a smaller screen to lower it? And also, what would happen if the Wattage reqiurement overpowered the PSU? Would it damage my machine? Please reply!

8800 GTX TDP = 145 Watt
6850 TDP = 127 Watt

So as I said in the previous post ,if your current system is rockstable (under load) with the 8800 GTX..it should be just as stable with a 6850 since it actually has a lower maximum powerdraw.

Dell is known to rate their PSU's very low, but they actually manage to get very close to their rated power. This is the opposite of most PSU's ,which might claim 500W but actually buckle as soon as you ask them to provide a stable 400Watt.
Dell seems to use a rating that can be supplied reliably and stable while most PSU brands seem to rate the peak output, not what the product can push out stably 24/7


edit: if this is the review you checked : http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/gra...i-1gb-review/8
You'll see they list the system with a 6850 as drawing less power from the socket than most others (229W).
Also the system used has a higher wattage CPU and a 1000W PSU which won't be anywhere near peak efficiency at such low load.

Now I'm not saying your system is guaranteed to run a 6850, but I think the chance is pretty good it will...and if it doesn't just send the thing back within 7 days and get a full refund.

Thanks for the updated Watt usage, very reassuring.
I might test out the current card with FSX/Il-2 1946 anyway to see how it performs like you said, so I can be 100% sure when purchasing the 6850.

If it doesn't work, what should be my backup option that would do just as good of a job? (And no, the 8800GTX doesn't count ;) )

Anybody? (look at previous post)

Alternatives?
A new budget build which you buy in december of this year :p
Or stay with the current setup which will run 1946 and FSX just fine.

Don't think there is any other option that equals the 6850 in performance, draws as little power as it and only needs 1 PCi-E connector.

@Argo,

I financially regret the decisions that I made to upgrade my system, solely for CloD. Which is the only high-end game, I've tried to play.

My advice to you is "WAIT"...see what the dev's can come up with in terms of optimization. Then spend and build. I honestly believe that you will be better off in the long run and have more $ to spend on specific components that will better suit your needs to this game.

If you feel that you can't wait, (I couldn't), the advice given by others above this post is excellent and you should weigh it and follow it.

Best of Luck to You

I think your right pudfark- I can wait. Anyway, FSX and il-2 1946 still give off exceptional graphics, so I think i'll be A-ok. Case dismissed.