Good Budget 256mb Graphics Cards.


I

InsertFaveGameNameHere

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Howdy yo.

I'm tinkering with the idea of buying a 256MB AGP 8x graphics card, just to bump up the speed of dreamweaver, photoshop and various other games and programs.

However, upon scanning around online I keep getting told that most cards I see cheap are rubbish by a friend, but then he's willing to fork out £60 on a graphics card (not much by many standards) whereas I'd prefer to spend around £20 at most. I know its a diddly amount!

Anyway, the two main culprits he points out to me are the GeForce 5xxx series and the 6200. Are these cards really "that" bad? The rest of my system is a 1.5ghz AMD Ahtlon XP CPU and 1GB of RAM. I was thinking of 128MB for a graphics card but figured I may as well make use of the 8x possibility if I could. I know its not just memory that counts when it comes to cards but unless I'm playing a graphically intensive game am I going to need a top top-of-the-range card or would the general upgrade improve system performance significantly enough?

What would you recommend?

Cheers!
 
its pointless to measure graphics cards by the amount of ram they have, its really unimportant when you go over 128MB and the GFX chip on the card is what you are looking for to determine speed.

fx5xxx and nvidia 6200 are really crappy, the 6200 steals system ram to make up for its lack of onboard ram.

this is probably one of the best upto date cards you can get that is AGP and cheapish.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct....&subcat=403

it will probably need a PSU upgrade

heres another midrange one which is slightly newer and cheaper and directx 10 (i think it may be slower than the x1650, but you would have to look at specs on tomshardware or somthing)

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct....&subcat=403

in general a graphics card wont give you a dramatic increase in FPS it can give you a slight boost, what it would enable you to do is turn all the eye candy on and raise the Res keeping a similar fps to what you had before (fps is limited by the cpu on most games).
 
Cheers guys,

I'm not a huge fan of ATI, I currently use NVidia and like being able to keep the same driverset, are there any comparable NVidia cards?

Thanks again though! :) Thats a great help!
 
you still have to reinstall the drivers if you change to a better nvidia card, should always replace them.

the 6600gt is probably your best bet, its cheapish and mid range. served me well for 18 months.
 
OP-- the programs you described don't use your video card at all. The amount of system RAM you have is what matters to them, not video RAM. Photoshop in particular also benefits from multiple CPU cores, so even a low end modern dual-core CPU would do you a lot of good.

For gaming, simply put, 20gbp won't buy you a card to run modern games. It'll run stuff quite a few years old, but even something from the GF6xxx series will run you closer to $75. 6200 is scaled down as hell and provides awful performance.... and the GF5xxx line was pretty bad overall. If you want to run modern games, save up for a $100 8600GT 256MB card. You will need a motherboard with PCI-Express to support it.

Honestly, I'd just save up and do a full upgrade to your system. You can get a Socket AM2 motherboard, a good dual-core CPU like the X2 4000+, 2GB of DDR2, and an 8600GT for only a little over $300. You will also want a sufficient PSU (yours is most definitely not going to do the job if it's as old as the rest of your parts) and maybe a new HDD.... these SE16s I picked up are remarkably fast and quiet :)
 
Alright guys, I've got an old Nvidia GeForce MMX440 64MB card or something. AGP 2x.

I don't expect to play the newest games but given the jump up from what I have at the moment I'd still expect a decent increase in performance. I noticed stuff going faster when I recently upgraded my RAM to 1GB.

Yeah I looked into it and I think I saw that the 7600GS is the best card for under £50, so I'll keep an eye out for one of them. I'm in no desperate rush. You're right though, in reality if I want a super fast modern PC I need to get a serious overhaul.

Basically I felt my graphics card at the moment is probably holding the PC back slightly so was thinking about spending a bit of cash just to try speed it up a little.

Interesting it wouldn't have much effect on Dreamweaver and Photoshop though, I suppose it makes sense! Like I say - the gap between the one I have and the one I could get would be so big I'd hope for an improvement in the system performance overall regardless.

Thanks again peeps!
 
thanks for the further replies chaps.

Funny you mention those cards evol, after looking around I've decided I'll keep an eye out for a 7600GS - I found a site (possibly tomshardware) that said it was the best card under £50! :)

interesting stuff about acrobat and that, I'll keep me peepers peeled!
 
InsertFaveGameNameHere said:
Cheers guys,

I'm not a huge fan of ATI, I currently use NVidia and like being able to keep the same driverset, are there any comparable NVidia cards?

Thanks again though! :) Thats a great help!
Click to expand...
:ph34r:
 
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