buying a graphics card?

[Johnny8918]

ok guys. im in the market for a card and thanks to a couple of people i found one. but if i need to get another or somethin..what do i look for? what specs and all im sure that you guys can shed some light on the subject for us new guys

[jml90]

Ummmm what are you going to do with it? What's your budget?

[mateo leet-o]

well what card do you have now
and things to look for in a video card
core/memory clock
amount of pixel piplines/vertex shaders
how much memory and what type (ddr or gddr3)

[Johnny8918]

hehe. good point. plan on playing games like halo and joint ops and those and dont want to spend over 80 bucks. but what would you look for in a card? and whats the diff. between a pci and a pci-e and all?

[Johnny8918]

so whats the difference between ddr and gddr3? and i have the standard hub card that comes with the computer now. but plannin on gettin that asus that you showed me

[jml90]

Well thats a cramped budget I'd save up some more

[Johnny8918]

and how much would you normally spend on a card?

[mateo leet-o]

ok pci has a lot less bandwidth than pci-e, thats why normal pci sucks for graphics cards but pci-e is good
and i would recommend this if you have agp
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814170053
if you have pci-e you're not gonna get anything under $100
except this
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...2E16814135152R
which i wouldn't recommend unless you have a lot of system memory because it uses system memory
edit:gddr3 is a lot faster
if you could save up $20 more there are refurb 9800 pro's that would be a good choice

[Johnny8918]

and how much is a lot of system memory?

[nwo75200]

the least amount you should spend on a PCI-e card is 150 bucks, and that would get you a vanilla 6600 or a x700pro, everything below that sucks for gaming. The least you should spend on an AGP card is 110 bucks on a refurb 9800pro from newegg.

How much would you like to spend and are you looking to play the games the way they're meant to be played or just play them?

a lot of system memory is anything over 1GB, a lot as in too much

[Lord_Infamous]

Specs on the box cant really tell you much about the card. If it has 12 pipelines its good. Other than that, i would recommend finding cards you are intrested in then looking up how they perform on tomshardware.com or go to tomshardware.com and look at cards that perform well then look at prices

X800's - All good cards for all games
X700's = Decent for gaming
6800 Series - All Good cards for all games
6600 Series - 6600GT is good for all games. 6600 ok for light gaming. 6200 is crap
x600's and ATI 9600's are good for light gaming
X300 is crap
9800's are good for gaming
All Nvidia FX cards = Garbage
All Nvidia MX cards = Garbage
Nvidia TI cards = Outdated

All the cards mention above are pretty much what you will come across in any computer store

[mateo leet-o]

what about the quadro series
quadro series=garbage for gaming

[nwo75200]

Lord Infamous, that's a pretty good way of putting it.

To sum it all up, the best thing to do is ask people for advice on forums such as this one, and they will provide you with evidence (real game benchmark charts) so you can see for yourself just how good the card is.

[Johnny8918]

i see. ill have to keep that in mind. whats the diff between agp and the others. and is more pipelines or less pipelines better?oh, and how do you get an avatar on you profile??

[nwo75200]

i see. ill have to keep that in mind. whats the diff between agp and the others. and is more pipelines or less pipelines better?oh, and how do you get an avatar on you profile??

more pipelines is better, more bits for RAM (for ex: 128 is better than 64, 256 is better than 128) but as for the actual RAM capacity, more isn't always better, in certain cases 256MB is not better than 128-it's just a waste of money.

Go to user CP, on the left you will see edit avatar

[mateo leet-o]

the more piplines the better
agp=accelerated graphics port, it's a type of slot for your graphics card
pci-express=can't use agp graphics cards but can use pci-express graphics cards
has more bandwidth that agp
beat me to it nwo
my slow typing

[Johnny8918]

i see it but then what do you do? copy and paste? put in url?

[Johnny8918]

so can an agp card fit into a pci slot?or you need bigger.......or smaler?

[Lord_Infamous]

someone get this guy the link to tomsharware with the chart that shows all the new cards in 1 big benchmark.. im too lazy and some crazy old lady is taling to my dogs outside


Just dont go to tomshardware.com at school. your teacher may think your at a porno site like mine did

[Lord_Infamous]

AGP cards fit in an AGP slot ONLY
PCI-Express cards fit in a pci express slot ONLY
PCI cards fit in a pci slot ONLY .. if you only have a pci slot for a graphics card.. GARBAGE!!!!

If you give us your computer modle or ur motherbored name we will gladly tell you what slot you have