What Gfx card should I get?

I'm not sure about max settings, but 6800GS is still good card and it will give you a huge boost from that 5200 you have there.

X850XT is even a bit faster than 6800GS. So if you really want to play FEAR on it's maximal settings then I'd suggest you to go with x850xt otherwise 6800GS.

consider a psu upgrade too, if this 350 watt came with a cheap case company (raidmax just to name 1  ) or is this a brand name comp that ur just upgrading? either way if ur putting in an x850xt and have a lot of optical devices id look into a bigger psu... (although 350 should be enough, it could crash at full load if its a cheap one)

Yea I was thinking about upgrading the PSU but I looked over the requirements of the GT,GS,X850 and it said 350W was enough but still... I know first hand about not having enuugh power and can get a 500W PSU for $20 so I'll just get that prolly if my 350 chokes. Where are those deals on the X850 XT, I live in Canada and this is that X850 pro I was talking about
http://www.futureshop.ca/catalog/proddetail.asp?logon=&...
my friend said that at that price its a steal but I'm not sure. I' tried adding more ram already and had to return AZEN and Corsair ram cause it wasnt compatible with the timings of my generic 512 to run at 3200 speeds so... I'll try again somtime to get ram.
Otherwise I need a deal on that x850Xt u
About the speed of the XT: theVGA charts say otherwise becase if the Gs is better than a 6800GT then shouldnt it be faster than a XT?

Lol you've got it wrong. The GS is almost as good as the GT, the XT series are crap.

Well F.E.A.R. won't be playable at maximum settings on any of those videocards.

yea, fear barely runs at maxiumum (with softshadows) on a single 7800gtx, yes it does run but its not very smooth at high res's... the x850xt can be found at

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E1681...

this is the card everyone is talking about, very good card for how much it is, faster than the 6800gs/xt/gt also faster than the x850pro, the 850pro is crap dont get that, it onl has 12 pipelines its just an overclock x800. that x800xt aiw is probably cheaper than the x850pro too 269 is a steal for that card on agp, i duno if they ship to canada but you can prob find a similar deal there on that same card

My friend has a MSI 6600GT AGP gfx card and a 2.4ghz 1MB l2 cache Prescott and 512mb RAM. He runs fear on 800x600 at medium settings without Softshadows =/

i dun see any diff in resolutions... on a crt, i know on a lcd its much sharper when its in its native res (and runs faster too?) but a low res in my experience doesnt show any diff... any1 agree  

Are you kidding? Of course there is a difference. Ok sure, it looks a LOT sharper on an LCD, but a CRT playin at 1280x1024 is better lookin than a LCD playin at 800x600

i disagree, if the lcd has a native res of 1280x1024, running it at 800x600 it will not be sharp at all, but a CRT at 800x600 to me looks the same as a LCD running in its native res of 1280x1024... and on the CRT id argue that it looks better due to how much faster they are than lcd's

How much experience do you have with LCD's?

Lol no freaking way.

ive seen my friends 19 inch lcd... his does look better but its not the monitor, he has a better computer and runs css maxxed out (6x and 16x duno which is which filtering modes) i just run on high with no filtering... i run at 1024, he runs at 1280 look the same to me when he turns of AA and AF

6800GS will run Quake4 at 1024x768, with everything on high, I know because I just got both within the last 3 weeks. I get 60 FPS on Quake4.
I'm running an XP3200, with 1.5gb of ram. Would definatly recommend not blowing the whole wad on a vid card , because the games you mentioned recommend 1gb of memory. I upgraded from a 6600GT, and there was a big difference. I would get the 6800GS, and more ram, which you could do for $300 US easy. zipzoomfly.com has a BFG overclocked, 6800GS for $199. To play Quake4 on VERY high, you need at least 512mb on the vid card, at least thats what the warning I got from the game said when I tried, but High looks very good. Sold my 6600gt to a buddy who has FEAR, he max's out on med. settings

for 30 dollars more than a 6800gs u can get the x800aiw which will blow a 6800gs away... if ur budget fits 229 then get that for sure, and if u have 512 memory upgrade to 1 gig

Nah your wrong dude.. the 6800gs is VERY competitive wth the x800 series.. it even competes with the 6800ultra in some situations... it was even hard for me to choose between the x800gto2 and the 6800gs

There are some great clocks available in the PCI-e ones, But He is talking AGP though, which are clocked 350/1000. Evga has one that could compete with the 6800GT and X800XT out of the box. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E1681...

Still not the cheaper/faster PCI-e version though, clocked 490/1100 : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E1681...

hey you cant run quake 4 or fear on maximum without a 512 mb graphics card. maybe at medium settings. with a 850 xt or a 6800 series card.

I seriously doubt your CRT looks better than my LCD monitor. :wink:

and with an aftermaket cooler you could overclock the 16 pipeline x800aiw making it way faster than the agp 6800gs... although i hear the aiw runs crazy hot on stock cooling, so if u plan to overclock get an aftermarket cooler

no doubt about that because my CRT is about 8 years old  , but i duno its prob just me but LCD tvs/monitors dont look as crisp as a CRT... im sure if i went out and bought a 19in viewsonic flat screen itd look just as nice as ur lcd  

OH AGP. I stand corrected then.  

do pipelines even make a difference anymore? i read on a post in this forum that its more about shaders than pipelines, it seems that since the 6800gs with 12 pipes keeping up with an x800xt with 16 makes this sound like its believable...

Just look at the x1900XTX which only has 16 pipelines i believe, and 48 Shaders and blows 7800 gtx away.

Well it depends, the GS is simply 3/4 the card that the GT is, clockspeeds make up the rest of the difference.

So it's 12:12:12 shader to pipeline to ROP.

The X1900 works on the idea that the shader instructions/math are the bottleneck where the ROPs are never fed enough to display more than 16 pixels per clock, so for multi-pass more complex calculations they can perform more operations and then keep the ROPs constantly filled with output material. The GF7800 series works that way too but they are interested in the pipeline remaining intact feeding less ROPs at 24/20:16, thus achieving a similar system with less complexity and a little less grunt, but still limited to the 16 pixels per clock.

Now the GF6800GS is still a maximum of 12 pixels per clock, and the GT is 16 pixels per clock, the question is which can get filled first. Does the higher speed of the GS help it produce overall more pixels than the GT or is it's 16 pipelines always feeding the 16 ROPs optimmally. I'm sure alot of that dependson the app and settings. Looking at the benchmark you can see alot of that back/forth play going on, but for the GF6800GS versus X800XT it's also about playing to the strengths, and the X800XT beats the GF6800U in most situations, so the ground needed to be made up by the GS is sizeable since it has a pipeline disadvantage AND a clockrate disdadvantage (compared to the speed advantage over a GT).

Pipelines still matter, but some aspects matter more than others, and if at any part of the equation there's an imbalance, then either something's getting saturated or starved, thus robing the card of potential performance, now both ATi and nV are looking for the optimal balance.

good response   im informed now!