GFX card help

[geordiedmw]

As you all know im slowly tying to update my pc specs to something a little bit half decent, i have sorted the ram issue out and now looking for a new gfx card was thinking maybe radeon 9800 pro card however ive come acros problems allready

my current card is this
nVidia GeForce4 MX 460

is this an agp or a pci card i have no idea, any way if u wonderfulll tech people could let me know and also what is the best card i should be looking for for £110 and under as this is the max would be much appreciated

thanks in advance

[TheTrout]

That my little Geordie friend is an 8x AGP card and yes you can happily replace it with a Radeon 9800 :)

Actually I'm lying it would appear to be a 4x agp card.

You will need to check what speed your AGP slot is set at. Right click on your desktop, and click on advanced. Somewhere in there it will tell you your AGP slot speed (sorry I can't be more detailed but it's different on each machine)

[JanthraX]

hey Geordie, whats is your PSU, what watt it is ?
if u put in a new powerful GFX card it might not run with your old PSU
i still have a GeForce 4 and i still think its fine, it runs CS.S good enough

[geordiedmw]

Jan thanks for the tip on the psu m8 however i dont know what my psu is and cant find out
i have a sony vaio pcv rx406 desktop i have been on the sony web site and it dosent tell me neither in the specs or in their knowledge database any ideas?

[Lid]

Hi geordie if u can stretch to a little bit more than £110 in my opinion it would be worth getting a Geforce 6600GT instead of the radeon.

Some of them are alot more expensive than you are willing to pay but u can get some of the cheaper manufactures or sometimes a special offer and u could pick 1 up for about £120 you would need to shop around a bit.

And there is very little difference between the different manufactures the main difference is more expensive 6600GT's will overclock further but if ur not interested in doing that a cheaper make will be fine.

Reviews of cards here:
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2295

Some of the cheaper cards are
Galaxy (came third in the review above and they did have it cheap on ebuyer b4 not sure if its still there)
Sparkle
Inno3d
ExpertVision
Heres a few examples:

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?rb=7332033715&action=c2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=81344

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=174171

and you could always try ebay if you dont mind buying on there, there are usually quite a few:)

Just make sure you buy an AGP version as they are avaliable in AGP and PCI-E.

Hope that helps you mate sorry if i went on a bit, its only my opinion and the radeon is also a very good card but for a little bit more the 6600GT is worth getting.

[JanthraX]

Hey geordie look on the back of your pc, there might be a sticker which will tell u the power rating of your psu!

[geordiedmw]

hehe have upraded my card, my misus refused to but on line so had to go retail "incase you break it" lol

paid £75 for radeon 9600 ati atlantis 256mbddr card installed working sweet, only problem i have is that source seems to run on about 30fps for some reason and thats with the details turned down lo or full on oh btw source is even more eye candy when useing a card that can support it also not as laggy even on 30fps