Graphics Card Advice Please.

[Mark The Cabby]

Guys,

I purchased a new PC two weeks ago and i'd like to upgrade the graphics card from the cheep Nvidia GeForce 8400 (256MB) that came with it.

My PC Details are 2.2Mhz AMD Phenom Quad-Core Processor, 3.00 GB of DDR2 RAM & 500GB hard drive.

I would like to stay with Nvidia if poss, I was looking at the Nvidia 8800 Ultra. But to be honest i don't really know what to look for. Just seems that the card i have is letting the rest of my system down???

And advice would be great as i really want to get into PC gaming.

Thanks...

[Penfold101]

What sort of games were you looking at mate, and what size screen do you use...?

[videodoctor]

I've got a Nvidia 512mb 8800GT which can be bought from Ebuyer for £104.

Click on link to see the one i bought.
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/142228
You have to be careful when selecting a graphics card that it is quiet when in use.The above is extremely quiet and is top notch at gaming.It can play every game at 1280 by 1024 with all the settings maxed out and it still gives 60fps+.

[Mark The Cabby]

What sort of games were you looking at mate, and what size screen do you use...?

Just the avarage game COD and that kind of thing, And i have a 19" LCD

[Penfold101]

As Videodoctor says, the 8800GT will do fine, or the slightly more recent 9600GT which I've got. Both will do absolutely fine what you want, but the 9600 is a little newer and runs slightly cooler due to a newer and smaller GPU chip. Both cost about 100 squid, available from all over the place.

The 8800 Ultra is a very powerful card, but is overkill for what you need, still expensive, and very old in comparison... I'll do a few searches and post up some links for you dude...

[Penfold101]

Leadtek GeForce 9600 GT 512MB GDDR3 TV-Out/Dual DVI/HDMI (PCI-Express)

[Mark The Cabby]

Thanks for your quick reply's Penfold, I'll have a look at that link.

[n_hudson]

You need to be careful, to run a high end graphics card, your motherboard needs a high Front Side Bus Rate (FSB) at least 800 or even better 1033Mhz, also your RAM plays a massing part, load it up as much as possible, again go for the higher DDR2 or even DDR3, and 800Mhz+. You could even look at overclocking the CPU, QUAD cores don't really get much better benchmarks than the Dual Core 2.

[n_hudson]

Also try and go SLI, you can run 2x graphic's cards at the same time...

[MalcGSI]

Also the 8800 GTS 512mb is worth looking at, even Crysis is playable with it!!