Planning on upgrading GPU, please advice.

I'm currently planning on upgrading my GPU (and various other things), however i do not wish to replace too many bits.

Some of my current PC specs:

CPU: Q6600 @2.4gHz
GPU: 8600gs
RAM: 3 gigs of ddr2 @ 667mHz (gonna upgrade this in a month)
OS: Vista home premium SP1

I planning on upgrading to either an HP GeForce GT130 (768 MB) or an XFX GeForce GT 240.

The 240 is cheaper, but it uses PCIE 2 x16, and my main concern (and reason for creating this thread) is that when it downthrottles to the regular x16, it'll be worse than the 130.

I do not wish to replace the motherboard, I'll purchase a new PC if i ever feel the need to do such a thing.

 

First off, you will NOT see any difference between a PCI-E2.0x17 and PCI-E1.0x16. The 2.0x16 doubles the bandwidth of a 1.0, but cards today do not use enough bandwidth to actually saturate a full x16 slot. No worries there, mate!

Looking at the price range of those two cards, get an HD5670. It is extremely low-power (consumes 25Watts during gaming), is better than the GT240, overclocks a bit, DX11 yadda yadda. It'll play Empires just fine.

 

I agree with Brutos. HD 5750 or 5770 will be better.

And I would first only upgrade the graphic card. Depending on the game or application you might barely notice a faster CPU.
I have a E7200 (2x2.533GHz) with HD4850 and Empires for example needs only 50% - 70% of the CPU while playing at 1920x1200.

 

Due to my trust in predom, i suppose i'll do that (as i dont wanna swap the power supply either)

I have a choice between the following two without having to wait for it to ship to the store:
Sapphire Radeon HD5670


And
XFX Radeon HD5670


Is there any major difference between the two? the XFX is cheaper by ~100dkr.

Also @ brutos and SIP: those two are a bit more expensive that what i wanna use, i may be able to buy a PNY Quadro FX 5800 Incl G-Sync Board 1 for the lulz, but i hate spending money

 

All AMD cards don't need much power. My system is running with a 350 Watt power supply (90 Watt idle, 180 Watt full load).

As far as I know they are all using the default board layout from AMD. So the main different is the cooling. And because the HD5670 needs only 2D: 16 Watt and 3D: 61 Watt the card manufactures can only fail at the fan control.

 

I've ordered the Sapphire Radeon HD5670 and will pick it up later today. Requesting thread lockage/deletion.
Edit: GPU has been installed.

 

quadro
Rendering beasts :D

 

fix'd :confused:

/ j/k, any decent gfx card can handle them :p

 

Check stepping in the Q6600 if its G0 you should be able to get it to 3 on air easily.

 

Can't go wrong with a S3 Savage.

 

Seems like you don't know what the Quadro is for >_> It utterly fails for playing video games, it's for rendering output to files, like images or video.

 

Like 5 fps per second? Well, that would sum up all the rants about the particles, thus quatro would have good results since we are here at the very bottom of fps and more power>more speed in that case, it's not for gaming obviously but I didn't say that, did I ...

 

Yeah but it's got all that power...imagine if someone figured out a way to hack its BIOS to change the double precision to single-precision gaming goodness.

 

Would probably offer more performance for your money to go with an equally priced gaming GPU, no?

 

That's why I wrote j/k, because the claims ranged to unbelievable amount of rendertime for particles,
which would perform better with a quad,
because they need so much power that you would get better results if you put 4*power into your power,
joke was too high, right?

 

So far i've been able to max all my games and have them run absolutely beautifully (avg ~60 fps).
This is only including the games i actually own, i've uninstalled most of my torrented games at present.

 

hire a bunch of koreans to interperate code and draw game for u at 60fps