HD Card advice needed

[Jason-m]

Hello all, first post here and looking for some advice.

I have just purchased a new HP Pavilion p6203uk with this spec

Operating system Genuine Windows (R) 7 Home Premium
Operating system mode 64-bit
Processor brand Intel
Processor model Pentium Dual-Core
Processor Number E6300
Processor clock speed 2.8GHz
Processor cache 2MB
RAM memory size 4GB
RAM memory type DDR3
RAM memory clock speed 1066MHz
Hard drive capacity 320GB
Hard Drive Spin Speed 7200rpm
First hard drive interface SATA

I want to purchase a video car for it, the main purpose would be to play HD movies on my LCD tv ( gotta work out how to do that as well lol ) and to also play some games, as this will be the first ever graphics card i have ever bought you can imagine the minefield i have just entered when i tried to do some research...

So far i have found 2 that i would like your opinions and advice on, they are the ATI Radeon HD 3850 and the ATI Radeon HD4670 512MB GDDR3, i would also welcome any other suggestions that you may have for me..

Thanks

Jason

 

[ridic23]

Considering ur spec....u can go for the 4670....u can play HD movies with it like a charm....but with games u have 2 tone down the res or use ur native monitor.....

 

[Jason-m]

Something else that confuses me is..whats the difference with it being Asus, Sapphire, Novatech etc...?

 

[ridic23]

All are companies manufacturing GFX cards with the same chips from ATI....The only difference will be in terms of the warranty and customer support offered....In some cases the GFX cards will be manufactured with performance boosts although with a slightly different name and an elevated price tag.....

 

[Jason-m]

I also see that it comes in 512 and 1GB...which one would i need

 

[ridic23]

The 512mb would be a good choice.....If u go for high range card it may be bottlenecked.....u can go for 1gb if u r plannin on upgrading the CPU...

 

[TheGreatGrapeApe]

512MB is fine, the card really can't do much with 1GB of VRAM, the rest of the parts just aren't powerful enough to see much benefit from being able to store larger textures, increase resolution, or increase anti-aliasing settings.
If the memory and core speeds are the same, and the cards are equally priced, then sure go with 1GB, but the impact would likely be minimal (like +/- 1-5% which would pretty much go unnoticed).

 

[tijmen007]

1gb or 512mb on a HD4670 won't make a diffrence, even 256mb would do fine on it.
Since the card is low-end and is not capable of doing heavy game-required calculations it wouldn't have the chance of using 1gb of memory space since it's too much data for the gpu to process.

 

[Jason-m]

Thanks for the info everyone...have plumped for the Gigabyte HD4670 512MB