Alrighty, the sticky had a template, so without further ado...
APPROXIMATE PURCHASE DATE: ASAP
BUDGET RANGE: ~$100 USD After Rebates (I can fudge on that a bit if necessary - maybe up to $150 or so, but only if it's going to give me a tangible benefit for my uses)
USAGE FROM MOST TO LEAST IMPORTANT: Gaming [Starcraft 2, Star Wars: KotOR I/II, PS2/Gamecube/Wii emulation], watching movies.
CURRENT GPU AND POWER SUPPLY: Nvidia Geforce 7900GT and 500W Rosewill PSU.
OTHER RELEVANT SYSTEM SPECS: Don't think there's anything too relevant. I do have an empty slot next to my PCI Express 16x slot, so a big card probably won't be a big deal. No extravagant cooling in my case, but I don't think I'll be needing a real power hog.
PREFERRED WEBSITE(S) FOR PARTS: Newegg, Amazon, wherever's cheap/reliable.
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN: USA
PARTS PREFERENCES: Nvidia and XFX have kind of left a bad taste in my mouth, and I'm all for giving ATI/AMD a try.
OVERCLOCKING: Not likely, but hey if the card I get happens to be OC-friendly, it wouldn't upset me
SLI OR CROSSFIRE: Don't think so unless it's really going to benefit my usage and fit my budget (so I'm thinking that's a no)
MONITOR RESOLUTION: 1680x1050 (who knows though - one of these years I might upgrade to 1920x1080 or 1920x1200 though)
ADDITIONAL COMMENTS:
I should probably clarify that I'm not really dissatisfied with my current card's raw performance. As you can see above, I don't play a lot of cutting edge games, so I'm not really looking for something too overpowered. A few little annoyances have prompted me to get something new though.
First, Nvidia's scaling (for using non-native resolutions) does not work properly with my monitor. Nvidia's drivers will scale to my monitor's maximum resolution (1600x1200) rather than my monitor's native resolution, which my monitor in turn scales to its native resolution, leading to an extra blurry, skewed image. I spent countless hours trying to tweak things or get Nvidia to fix the issue to no avail. I'm hoping that the scaling in AMD's world will work a little more sanely. (Anyone know anything about that?)
Second, over a year ago, Nvidia made a change in their drivers that caused timing issues where XFX's 7900GTs would display nothing but garbage in place of full screen HW-accelerated graphics. (This makes Aero or other HW-accelerated desktop compositors unusable, and games impossible to play.) A workaround was to very slightly overclock the card. I did so and it solved that issue, but I've noticed funny little graphics artifacts from time-to-time ever since.
I also thought it might be fun to try out a card that had some descent open source drivers (for Linux), though I understand they might still perform more poorly than the proprietary drivers. I know ATI cards used to have a fairly bad reputation on Linux systems but (and correct me if I'm wrong here) I was under the impression that things have improved a bit over the years? I do run Linux on this machine fairly often, so I'm hoping the card will work acceptably there.
Optional things...
■I'm also thinking a card with HD H.264 hardware decoding might be nice. I know AMD's GPU video decoding is still young in the Linux world, but I gathered that the Radeon HD 4000 and 5000 series have some potential for it, and should work just fine with it in Windows?
■DirectX 11
■OpenCL
So, all that said, I'm not very savvy when it comes to comparing graphics cards, so I was looking through the Best Card for the Money articles and was thinking maybe the Radeon HD 5570 or 5750 might be suitable. What are your insights? (I'm also curious how those compare in terms of raw speed with my old 7900GT.) Thanks in advance.
APPROXIMATE PURCHASE DATE: ASAP
BUDGET RANGE: ~$100 USD After Rebates (I can fudge on that a bit if necessary - maybe up to $150 or so, but only if it's going to give me a tangible benefit for my uses)
USAGE FROM MOST TO LEAST IMPORTANT: Gaming [Starcraft 2, Star Wars: KotOR I/II, PS2/Gamecube/Wii emulation], watching movies.
CURRENT GPU AND POWER SUPPLY: Nvidia Geforce 7900GT and 500W Rosewill PSU.
OTHER RELEVANT SYSTEM SPECS: Don't think there's anything too relevant. I do have an empty slot next to my PCI Express 16x slot, so a big card probably won't be a big deal. No extravagant cooling in my case, but I don't think I'll be needing a real power hog.
PREFERRED WEBSITE(S) FOR PARTS: Newegg, Amazon, wherever's cheap/reliable.
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN: USA
PARTS PREFERENCES: Nvidia and XFX have kind of left a bad taste in my mouth, and I'm all for giving ATI/AMD a try.
OVERCLOCKING: Not likely, but hey if the card I get happens to be OC-friendly, it wouldn't upset me
SLI OR CROSSFIRE: Don't think so unless it's really going to benefit my usage and fit my budget (so I'm thinking that's a no)
MONITOR RESOLUTION: 1680x1050 (who knows though - one of these years I might upgrade to 1920x1080 or 1920x1200 though)
ADDITIONAL COMMENTS:
I should probably clarify that I'm not really dissatisfied with my current card's raw performance. As you can see above, I don't play a lot of cutting edge games, so I'm not really looking for something too overpowered. A few little annoyances have prompted me to get something new though.
First, Nvidia's scaling (for using non-native resolutions) does not work properly with my monitor. Nvidia's drivers will scale to my monitor's maximum resolution (1600x1200) rather than my monitor's native resolution, which my monitor in turn scales to its native resolution, leading to an extra blurry, skewed image. I spent countless hours trying to tweak things or get Nvidia to fix the issue to no avail. I'm hoping that the scaling in AMD's world will work a little more sanely. (Anyone know anything about that?)
Second, over a year ago, Nvidia made a change in their drivers that caused timing issues where XFX's 7900GTs would display nothing but garbage in place of full screen HW-accelerated graphics. (This makes Aero or other HW-accelerated desktop compositors unusable, and games impossible to play.) A workaround was to very slightly overclock the card. I did so and it solved that issue, but I've noticed funny little graphics artifacts from time-to-time ever since.
I also thought it might be fun to try out a card that had some descent open source drivers (for Linux), though I understand they might still perform more poorly than the proprietary drivers. I know ATI cards used to have a fairly bad reputation on Linux systems but (and correct me if I'm wrong here) I was under the impression that things have improved a bit over the years? I do run Linux on this machine fairly often, so I'm hoping the card will work acceptably there.
Optional things...
■I'm also thinking a card with HD H.264 hardware decoding might be nice. I know AMD's GPU video decoding is still young in the Linux world, but I gathered that the Radeon HD 4000 and 5000 series have some potential for it, and should work just fine with it in Windows?
■DirectX 11
■OpenCL
So, all that said, I'm not very savvy when it comes to comparing graphics cards, so I was looking through the Best Card for the Money articles and was thinking maybe the Radeon HD 5570 or 5750 might be suitable. What are your insights? (I'm also curious how those compare in terms of raw speed with my old 7900GT.) Thanks in advance.
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