New video card

Hey, just thought I'd look for some advice;

Built a new PC a couple of weeks ago, and bought a BFG 9500GT 1gb card.

Rest of PC specs are
AMD Athlon 64 x2 6000+ (3.185 Ghz)
2gb ram (other stick died... wtf)



So, thinking I might have to upgrade my GPU AGAIN, as Empire: Total War is coming out soon.


Not looking to spend a fortue, $150 or less would be a Godsend.

Or should I keep the 9500?


Resolution-- 1024 x 768

Or even check out a 4670 if short on cash. Get rid of the 9500. I have a 9600gt with an Athlon x2 5200+ and 2 gb of ram, and it's running most things I have quite happily.

For $150 or less, I suggest you get a 4850 or 9800GTX/GTX+
Those are the best cards for your money.

As for specs, it used to be clock speeds, but now it really doesn't matter since clock speeds have gone down and other specs have gone up. Just look at the GPU's gaming benchmarks from various websites to see its performance.

As Bluescreen says, its really down to benchmarks rather than memory/core speeds or number of shaders, each company has their own architecture and they cannot really be compared so simply.

BTW `stup` should have been `stump`.

And I like this sites benchmark tables;

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews [...] ic_216_SP/

The specs can sometimes be misleading. The GTX260 for example, has significantly better specs than the 9800GTX on paper - 2x more transistors, 50% more memory, almost 2x more memory bus, 50%-80% more shader units, etc

However, in actual benchmarks, the GTX260 performances only around 15%-20% better.

Does your motherboard support 2 GPU's(2 x PCIe-16)? Then keep the 9500GT as a PhysX processor and get another GPU for the rest of work. For 1024x768 9800GT would be enough. HD4830 is known to be 9800GT killer card. I'm not sure about that.