Graphics card for a 2 ½ year old pc

pardon22 · Nov 15, 2009

My old time goodpal GeForce 8800 GTS just broke down recently.
In the following specs what card would you recommend for gaming and watching movies, and should i invest in more ram?

MB: Gigabyte P35-DS3R
[strike]VGA: GeForce 8800 GTS 320mb[/strike]
Power Supply: Corsair HX520W
Processor: Intel core duo E6600
RAM: 2x1GB Corsair
System: Win XP Professional Service Pack 3

Mousemonkey · Nov 15, 2009

Why not give one of ATi's 5 series a go?, and more RAM on XP is pointless and as DDR2 is not getting any cheaper, I wouldn't bother.

obsidian86 · Nov 15, 2009

you could get the 5770/5750 with 4gb ram a cpu cooler for a bit of overclocking http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/page-240001_11_0.html and upgrade to win7 64 bit

pardon22 · Nov 15, 2009

I think my choice is between a 4870(1GB or 512MB?) or a 5770.
Is DX 11 support and whatnot worth the extra cost, and I read here in a review that the older 4870 card performs slightly better than the 5770, what would you recommend?

pardon22 · Nov 15, 2009

obsidian86 :

What would the difference in performance be from WinXP with 2GB ram to Win7 with 4 GB?

obsidian86 · Nov 15, 2009

xp 32 bit can only fully utilise 4gb ram including vram on your graphics card so for example say your graphics card has 512 ram so now xp 32 bit can only handle 3.5 gb ram now on new 64 bit operating systems they can use terabytes of ram if you could get that much, but more usable ram will give you better performance in overall productivity and multitasking

the 4870 is a bit better then the 5770 currently but with driver updates the 5770 should surpass the 4870 in time

pardon22 · Nov 15, 2009

How would the 5770 do on my current system? - would I HAVE to overclock, get more ram and buy win7?

Mousemonkey · Nov 15, 2009

No, just apply card and do the driver change thing and you should be good to go.

pardon22 · Nov 15, 2009

Mousemonkey :

Just to be sure here :pt1cable:

:
So there is no need to boost the other specs to make a 5770 or a 4870 live up to it's potential?

Also: What is the difference between 512MB and 1GB on these cards?

obsidian86 · Nov 15, 2009

should be fine higher memory just gives better performance on higher resolutions

pardon22 · Nov 15, 2009

Many thanks for the advice, I'm going for the HD 4870 option.

coozie7 · Nov 15, 2009

^ Probably for the best, ATI has yet to post any drivers for the 57XX cards under XP anyway

The CPU is a good overcloacker BTW, and a HD4870 will benefit from boosting the CPU speed, take a look at the overclocking forum for advice.
My experience of the RAM issue is that 4Gb is not entirely wasted but if you do not multitask greatly then it's probably not worth the expense, although it does help speed up exiting from memory hungry games.

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