Hi, I am thinking of purchasing a replacement for my trusty pcx 7600GT and I am totally lost when it comes to graphic cards. As the SLIs, benchmarks and tech stuff in general all sound like gobbledygook to me, I thought maybe some of you could have any word of advice. This is what I am looking for:

1.- All my games are GOGs or older than 2009, so I guess don't need the ultimate card with nuclear fusion core and liquid helium cooling system. If I can fluidly play Dawn of War or Neverwinter Nights with max settings, that's ok.

2.- I prefer not to deal with alternate power sources or anything of the sort, so much better if it's just plug in the pcx slot and go.

3.- Given the above points, of course the cheaper the better.

I think I didn't miss anything. So, any advice is welcome.

Thanks in advance guys.

Compare your current card on this list with a card you want to possibly buy, and go from there.

Honestly, right now you can go for some pretty budget cards and be more than set with most games. Pretty much anything above 50 bucks will get you 1 gb of video ram (maybe as low as 512mb vram, but still a pretty hefty upgrade over your current one). I'll leave it to others to recommend specific cards but if your goal to not move much beyond what you've already stated, you can get off pretty cheap.

Well, I might go for a GeForce 440GT, it ranks 4 times the benchmark of my 7600GT in GameRager's table and I can get one for about €60, which I think is quite reasonable.

Thanks both.

Something like the GeForce 550ti would probably fit the bill quite well, it comes in at around £77 (Roughly 95 Euros). You will get decent performance out of newer stuff if you wanted to go down that route and will be perfect for 2009 games in higher resolutions :

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/geforce-gtx-550-ti-gf116-radeon-hd-5770,review-32142.html

Just look around online for pricing understandably, when I done a search it came up with all UK suppliers given my location.

Paying a little extra would give you a bit of future proofing also

I too am in similar situation to yourself OP.
Taking into account 1) 2) and 3), your best bet is probably either ATI 5670 (harder to find) or ATI 7750. Both are listed on tomshardware as very good value cards - neither require extra power connector. And in the 7750's case it is currently (as per Toms Hardware) the fastest card you can get that doesn't need the extra power connector from the PSU. I currently have a 5670 and currently trying to find a 2nd one (for 2nd pc) - <$100. The 7750 is about $127 AUD (Factory overclocked Gigabyte version). Other versions are priced similarly.

No idea about Nvidia cards

When I had to made the same choice a month ago when buying a new computer, I had about the same criteria:

1. I play mostly old games. I wanted a bit better than my previous 8500 GT, but it needn't play the newest games on full specs,

2. I was aware of issues with newer nVidia cards and the IE engine (Baldur's Gate and the like), so no GeForce, and also not too modern hardware to reduce the chance of conflicts,

3. Cheap as well as not consuming too much energy (better for the environment and no separate power needed).

I chose the AMD Radeon HD 6670, am very happy with it, and right now (may 2012) it's the best buy in the budget category, according to Tom's Hardware

I recommend it.

What issues? I play the IE games frequently (currently running through Icewind Dale 1 yet again) and haven't seen any issues with my cards (GTX 560Ti, GTX 275, GTX 260, and 8800GT have all been cards I've used to play the games).


OP: what's the issue with a card requiring a separate power connector? Does your PSU not have an extra one? Speaking of PSUs, make sure yours is powerful enough to handle whatever new card you decide on.

First of all we need to know your PSU wattage and brand, then the size and cooling ability of your case. From then on we can determine how we can help you.

No point putting a higher spec card if it'll choke to death or blow the PSU.

I vote for this card too.. best price/quality in the normal budget range.

Thank you all for your suggestions. The motherboard is an Asus P5LD2 SE, and my PS is 400w. I don't remember it had any cooling devices other than the usual-run-of-the-mill cpu fan. I honestly have no idea if my PS has any separate power connectors or not; I guess it's just a little laziness on my part. I don't like having to wire extra stuff and wasting extra power unless there is a pretty good reason to do it.

I am reading about that Radeon 6670 and I'm liking it :)

It's easy enough to see whether you have extra connectors or not, unless it's modular. But your biggest concern should be whether or not your PSU can supply enough power for the card. Do you know what brand and model of PSU you have? It's not just the wattage you need to be concerned with, but the amperage on the 12 volt rail as well.

A 400W is cutting it close for a 6670, what is the rest of your system? Cpu, amount of ram, amount of HDD;s.

Any other extras, PCI cards?

Sorry, I can't tell you. I did some searching back then which I tried to repeat now, but I can't find a comprehensive list. The one I'm familiar with is the black boxes in the fog-of-war, which I could deal with by turning off Software Transparant BLT, but there's so much complaining about issues with nvidia cards, I just wanted to be on the safe side.

There was one topic in particular on the nvidia forums where the infinity engine was widely discussed, but searching the forums gives all topics with the word engine as a result, not very helpful.

*edit: found it! Please fix Infinity Engined games (DirectDraw) black boxes, cursor trails, transparency

Off course, chances of running into issues likewise means chances of not running into issues at all.

I was totally lost when it comes to graphic cards, too, and I still am, but what I learned is that when you're looking to substitute yours with a newer one, you should make sure that your motherboard is compatible with it.

I can't claim I fully understand what it's all about, but apparantly my old motherboard is only "PCI Express 1.0 complaint" and the new graphic card I chose for it was "PCI Express 2.1 complaint" and "backwards compatible to PCI Express 1.1a motherboards", but has issues with earlier revisions. Not knowing anything about graphic cards I spend a lot of time on wondering what was wrong, until I learned this PCI Express compatibility can cause issues.

Depending on the age and quality of your motherboard, this might not even be relevant in your case, I'm just saying better safe than sorry. It can spare you quite some trouble if you're informed about that kind of stuff.