Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
which graphics card?
monster004
Member Posts: 17
in Hardware
Hi,
I have a PC running windows XP sp2, I have a PciEx16 slot available.
I want to spend about £150 max on a graphics card for games.
What do you think I should get?
I have seen a Radeon 3870 512mb PCIe card at Dabs for a decent price, woudl that be ok to run with XP?
Comments
Well sure, dx10 (vista) hasn't come out with many games so far, so DX9 (windows xp) is just fine with any card.. The 3870's rock, so do the 8800 series though. For a single card, it's more expensive but the 8800 is better than the 3870 in many ways. However the 3870 isn't a poor choice- and it fits in your budget.
--------------------------------------------------
ya thats a great card....im getting the x2 version soon
....
Yea HD3870 x2 beats the crap out of 8800 imo
thanks for your help, i will go and get one ordered today.
Get the 8800gt or 8800gts 512mb. Both beat out the 3870 on pretty much all games. The 3870 x2 is better but it's around £225.
Thats about $300 us right?
YOu can get the 3870, 8800gt, 3850, those are all good cards.
I think the 8800gt is still the best out of those three, but honestly, unless you have some monster of a kick ass monitor, the 8800gt and the 3870 will pretty much run the same for you. The 8800gt overclocks better if you replace the stock cooler...the 3870 doesn't do so well in that department.
3870 rocks if you can run it crossfire, but outside of that the 8800gt is better as far as single card.
3850 is a lower powered model than the 3870 and 8800gt, but is still a solid card, and it beats the crap out of the 8600gt.
Hope that helps. Any cards above what I mentioned are higher than your indicated price range, and is just fan boi's talking or people talking just to talk.
D.
You are apsolutely right, I didnt look at the price limit OP offered us.
HD3850 would be around that price, and it can run Crysis on high with smooth fps.(not max)
The problem is though that 3870X2 relies on crossfire, so if you are running a game that does not support crossfire (90% of MMO's) then you will effectively just be using a single 3870 which means you would be worse off than using an 8800. And ubless you game ay 1920/1200 or higher then an 8800GT or GTS will give you around the same performance as the X2.
There are actually other differences between the HD3870x2 and the normal 3870. One big one is how the card handles higher resolution. The performance gap gets bigger in favor the HD3870x2 at higher resolutions compared to the 8800 Ultra. However, with the HD3870 its the complete opposite.
On Crossfire, it really doesn't matter if the game supports it. Its how the game handles its rendering. If the game heavily uses CPU-bound rendering, then its effect will be limited. However if it uses CPU-bound rendering, then the whole GPU effect will be limited. Crossfire like SLI works independant of the game to instruct the GPUs what role they will play whenever the GPU is sent a rendering task.