Looking for a new GPU

[PiXeLaDo]

My good ol' 8400 GS has been failing on me lately so I wanna get a decent video card before it dies for good.

Some info you might want to take into consideration:
- Im not a heavy gamer whatsoever. Just a few hours of work and gameplay per day.
- I dont play any DX11 based games.
- I still use XP, so DX10 aint a so important for me either.

My budget goes from 80 to 150 bucks. My PC has a single 16x PCIe slot and a 650W PSU (read: no energy demanding GPUs).
I'm mostly interested in HD video (CoreAVC acceleration support plz) and a few games such as Portal 2 (my 8400 runs it fine with low settings) and older games such as RaceDriver GRID and DiRT.

I'm willing to give ATi a go, though I'd like to stay with nVidia.

[raynebc]

I bought a Radeon HD 4670 for $55 after rebate for my new PC recently. I've never been much of a PC gamer, but it runs PCSX2 and Dolphin very very well. Peoples' comparisons between the HD 4670 and the 8400GS also indicate the Radeon is quite a bit better, so it should be a step up from your current card.

[Rapt0r]

I'm currently using a 4870. They go for about $150ish now. I can run just about every game on the highest settings (Metro2033 and Crysis are the only ones I have to turn down but that's just so I'm running at 60fps instead of 30). I plan on getting a new card here soon though because I like nVidia's drivers ability for custom profiles for specific apps. Other than that, I've had no problems

[PiXeLaDo]

@Ray: Ah yes, my friend told me that the HD series were totally worth their price. How much VRAM does it ship with? Because my 8400 comes in both 256 and 512mb. This might be of interest whem comparing your HD with a 8400 (not implying youre wrong).

Oh, and I found a 9800GT for 100 bucks on my local online shop, and a 9500GT for $75 on a store just a few blocks from my house. At first I was like "lets get this bad boy!" because it has 1gb of VRAM but it has almost half the cores of the 9800.
HOWEVER I've read some reviews that show how the 9800 is just a tri-SLI enabled 8800GT, which I have not found yet.

@raptor: I'll ask my friend for his HD card, he said it's 1GB but I dont remember the model #

[Rapt0r]

Well, mine is also 1GB. Most mid-high end cards now are at least 1gb

[raynebc]

@Ray: Ah yes, my friend told me that the HD series were totally worth their price. How much VRAM does it ship with? Because my 8400 comes in both 256 and 512mb. This might be of interest whem comparing your HD with a 8400 (not implying youre wrong).

It has 1GB of memory. The previous Radeon I bought several months back (Radeon 5550 for my current computer) was supposed to have 512MB but it turned out to have 1GB instead? This confused me, but I'm not really complaining as it performs very well for a budget card. Supposedly, the 4670 outperforms the 5550.

[PiXeLaDo]

@Raptor: Ok, I'll check it up with him and see if it's that one.
BTW does it use a dedicated power line? Just asking coz some cards do and require a 700w+ PSU

@ray: hope youre not looking at whatever your card reports to the OS, because some use dynamic RAM cache and show up to twice their VRAM (my 8400 does).

[Rapt0r]

I only have a 520w PSU so I'm sure you'll be fine.

[JanZuKa]

I'm selling my old card, Radeon HD4850 with 1gb memory and I must say that's a pretty good card,with a sufficient processor it can run many new games on medium settings.

My new card is Radeon HD 6870. It cost me 190€ (still a budget card, nowhere close to high-end cards) and it can run crysis smoothly on max settings, so basically it'll serve me for years to come.

That said something you should keep in mind is your processor, it's not worth it to spend money on high-end card if your processor will bottleneck it.

About psu's, a rule of thumb would be quality 400W psu for single card and quality 650W psu for SLI/Crossfire (implying you don't have gazillion hard drives and stuff). A quality 400W psu is usually better than some Chinese no-brand 600W one.

My system has a cheap 650W Chieftec psu, Intel i5 2500k, that card I mentioned, 1 hard drive, 1 dvd drive, 2 120mm fans, 1 80mm fan and a whole bunch of leds and I'm doing just fine.

[PiXeLaDo]

That was why I asked for energy stuff, since my PSU is not top notch hw.
Also, my processor wont be a problem for the kind of stuff I'm doing with it (DualCore 1.8ghz) though I'm willing to upgrade it as soon as I save enough money.

Cuda/Stream support takes care of some CPU offload with CoreAVC, which is a nice feature I can't take advantage of with my 8400.

[Rapt0r]

>6870
>not high end

Wat. I'd say it's pretty high end (unless we're counting crossfire cards). There are only 3 AMD cards above it. Sure it's not top of the line but that's a pretty damn good card.

[PiXeLaDo]

I'd say it's pretty high end (unless we're counting crossfire cards).

you mean already linked crossfire cards, right? Because the 6870 is crossfire enabled.

[Rapt0r]

2 separate cards or cards with 2 built in.

Oh also, JanZuKa, I don't think you understand what the word implying means...

[JanZuKa]

Well it's matter of perspective, for me 6870 is a budget card. Also Amd's numbering is all ducked up, for example 5870, 5970 and depending on test setup 5850 outperform 6870. And of course 6950, 6970 and 6990 are far superior.

Oh well, I guess "given that" would've fit better.

[crazy.neo]

Your CPU is the major bottleneck, if you seriously don't care about games any card will do really, just be sure to choose a card compatible with CUDA or OpenCL. I don't know much about CoreAVC but if watching, not encoding, HD material is what you want your card probably supports MPC-HC and DXVA hardware acceleration.