9600GT 1GB or 4670 1GB

The THG review shows the 9600GT to be the better card for a little more money.

http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 404-2.html

With the small difference, finding a good sale on either can weight the balance. Alternatively, and perhaps better, look at the charts and pick the one that does better on the games YOU play.

Does your budget PC have a large enough PSU to support the upgrade? These cards don't take too much, but some budget PCs have small PSUs.

You want the best graphics card you can reasonably afford. Pick one from the list linked above that matches your budget range. Then go to the THG charts to see what performance you will get on different games.

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts [...] ,1195.html

Note that between 30 and 50 fps is decent play - any higher than that you won't notice the difference.

The 420w PSU should be adequate for the cards you are looking at. When you finally settle on a card though, check its minimum power requirement

You might also select the card higher and lower on the list and compare them on the charts - it is easy to do with the selector box on the charts to confirm you made the right decision.

By the way - both the 4670 and 9600 GT are good. I prefer the 9600GT because it is a little faster - others prefer the 4670 which is a little slower but is usually cheaper, a newer model. and uses a little less power. Here is an excerpt from the above charts for just those two cards - you can do similar on the link above if you want to look at other cards.

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts [...] 2457%5D=on

There are DDR2 and DDR3 versions of the 9600gt. The DDR3 performs well against a 4670, but the DDR2 version falls short. Be sure you know which one you are looking at.

Also, if you are not gaming at anything higher than 1650x1080 then the extra cash spent on the 1gb versions over the 512mb versions is mostly wasted. It is questionable in the first place if these cards can even make use of 1gb of vram.

Much lower power consumption on the 9600gt compared to the 9800gt. Generally speaking, as you go up in GPU list within a company, the power use goes up with it.