These are my current specs. HP AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5600+ 2.80 GHz NVIDIA GeForce 8500 GT 3.00 GB RAM I really just want to be able to do some gaming. I want to go back and replay Oblivion with high settings etc. I would love to keep it under 100, but I would appreciate any advise. Thank you Clutchfans!
Your goal should probably be something like an ATI 5xxx-series. To check on your power supply, you probably will have to take the case off your computer and see what wattage it's rated. If you can, while you're looking at it, see if you can get the name of the company that made it and the model. This info could also be on the back of your case on the power supply in plain view.
9800gt is around a hundred. It's newer version is the GT 250. I kinda need an upgrade, but both companies' numbering system is asinine.
What DoD said. I have an ATI Radeon HD 4850, which easily handles the games I play, and it requires at least a 450W power supply. Mine's pretty quiet. You can find one for around $125. The newer series of ATI cards might be a better bet, but I'm not sure about the cost/benefit thingy, or what their power requirements are. Do you have 64 bit Vista or 64 bit whatever? If so, you should bump up your memory. I got a nice performance increase after going with 8GB of memory.
Was there a big difference from 4gb to 8gb? I tried to upgrade to 8gb last month, but I found out my aftermarket cpu heat-sink/fan combo blocked one of my memory slots FTL
Video Card Type G3D Rating Rank GeForce 8500 GT 241 300 GeForce GT 240 750 078 Radeon HD 4850 1334 021 Radeon HD 5870 2607 001 I would go with the 5870. You can get a Radeon 4850 for $99 at newegg.com 4850 > GT240. Courtesy of http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu_list.php
I would pay a little more for a company with a lifetime warranty. If it breaks, they're usually good about giving you a comparable card or better.
If you can swing another $30 or so, get the ATI Radeon 5750. You'll be getting DirectX 11 support and a bit more "future proofing". If you don't want to spend $130 or so, then your best bet is the 4850, probably.
4850 is badass, but it is power hungry and possibly overkill for an athlon 64. The 5670 runs within the 75 watt pci-e spec...so no external power necessary and you don't run any risk of a bigger upgrade than anticipated. If you are the type that continually upgrades a pc then the 4850 is the better buy. If that machine is going to be playing Oblivion until the Earth suffers the heat death you can go with a lower power card.
Haha that was fun to read... I ended up getting the 4850... The first one on the first link Chow supplied actually... HOORAY... I am so pumped!!!
It did for me. I bought 4 sticks of Crucial Ballistix 2GB DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) low latency memory, with Cas Latency: 4 and Timing: 4-4-4-12. While there's better memory out there, it's still very good and was on sale. Far better than what came from HP. I don't know what to tell you about your cpu cooling thingy.
