miikman

Distinguished
Feb 10, 2012
11
0
18,510
Hi everyone,

I have a Quad-Core AMD Phenom II X4 975 Black Edition (3.6GHz) CPU,
PNY Electronics PC3-10666 DDR3 (8192 MB) RAM,
PCI-E 2.0 NVIDIA GeForce GT 240 (512 MB DDR5) Video Card,
in my ASUS M5A97 (Socket AM3+) Mobo,
with a Corsair 600-Watt Gaming Series GS600 Power Supply (48A on 1x 12v Rail),
on Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit.

I do play PC games and I like them to look at least decent.
I don't have to have every game on ultra settings, but I wouldn't mind if they could be.

I would like to upgrade my graphics card keeping within the $150 price range.
I have also decided to get an ATI this time because my motherboard has CrossFireX support and says nothing about SLI.
Dunno if that's a great reason, I'm not sure if running an ATI card in an AMD mobo is actually faster and/or more reliable.
I've always gone with Nvidia, but I BSoD every now and then due to an Nvidia driver, I'm ready to try something new.

I have been looking into the Radeon HD 6870 1GB GDDR5 PCI-E 2.1.
Will there be conflicts if I use a PCI-E 2.1 card in my PCI-E 2.0 slot?
This card also says to have a minimum power supply of 550 watts, am I too close for comfort?

Also is the Radeon HD 6870 worth the 150 bucks compared to a $150 dollar Nvidia card?
I have read reviews and heard that it is a good card but I would love real feedback.

I would really appreciate any help or suggestions you can give, Thanks for reading my post.
 

duxducis

Distinguished
Sep 24, 2007
489
0
18,860
I have pretty much same setup with few differences
I use AMD 6870 and its one good card, I run it on 430W Premium power supply with no problems, the biggest load i seen while playing games was 300W with that card