Video card upgrade advice...?

[Evilboy]

Hey all,

I'm not much of a PC expert....mostly a console gamer up to this point...but I just bought a new rig. Like I said, I'm more of a console gamer, and I've always treated our PC as more as an appliance than a gaming source.

Well, the PC we've been using for seven years (!!) was finally showing signs that the end of it's useful life was near, so I figured it was high time to start shopping for a new machine. My company gets a good discount with Dell, so I built a PC through them and figured I'd get as good of a machine as I could within my budget. Yeah, I know it's better to build your own, but I just wanted to get it done at one time in one place. That aside...

I ended up getting a Intel Core Duo 2.13Mhz with 2 gig DDR SDRAM, CD/RW DVD combo drive, 250gig HD and a ATI Radeon X1300pro video card. OS is Vista Home Premium.

I know the X1300pro is a low-end-ish card, my question is, it still runs great, but even though I'm not planning on doing a lot of gaming on the rig I still am interested in perhaps upgrading the video card a bit?

Right now, I can play Titan Quest (my current game of choice, one of the reasons I was glad to get a new PC) at 1024x768 with high details, high textures, medium shadows and reflections...but with no AA enabled. It runs fairly smoothly at those settings. I would like to be able to run with AA on, and perhaps even bump up the res without too much of a hit. Using TQ as a benchmark, any improvements I make would only benefit any other games I decide to get down the line...

Can any of you suggest a decent upgrade for <$200 (even less, if possible)? I am checking things on my own as well, but I figured I'd ask around on boards, too. My one reservation is that the power supply that the unit was built with is only rated at 305 watts...that's the one thing I wish I had been able to have control over. Keeping the PS rating in mind...any good suggestions for a performance boost?

Thanks!

[Jim S]

Well if you can go in the $230 range the 7900GT is a nice card that should allow you to play most games in higher res with AA. I have 7900GT's in SLI because I wanted to play all my games in the native res of my monitor at 1920X1200.

[Trebuken]

The newest Geforce 8800 GTS 320MB card is about to become available. I think it might run closer to $300, but it'd be worth it espeacially with ATI delaying their new cards until May.

You might also consider the ATI 1950 line-up.

[comptr]

try out the at 1950 pro card.

[HeadRusch]

Your power supply will require upgrading...300 watts is small even by year-2000 standards, thats disappointing that they only included a 300 watt model.

Unfortunately these videocards require power......and as you move up in GPU power, your power requirements will go up.

The ATI X1950 Pro is probably the best of the middle-ground boards out there by now....if you are talking about a resolution like 1280x1024, you'll be golden. Heck, I use one on my AGP system at 1920x1080, and even modern games are playable with AA and AF turned on at that rez. Some run better than others, but all are "playable".

(Example: Half Life 2, 1080p, 4xaa and 4xaf with full detail has never gone lower than about 45fps or so, and thats in some specifically heavy scenes...not the norm...and thats a $200 card). I run a 430 watt power supply......

If you want to go higher, however, then I'd consider the 7900GT's or other Nvidia parts....right now Nvidia can't be touched in the high-end card ($300 and up).

[SpeedyHTPC]

Also to consider is if you have a dual card slot space in your system. Perhaps later you will be able to upgrade the PSU to handle a 8800 GTX/GTS but it needs double slot full length room. Most MBs that can support it have a PCI-E x4 slot to the left of the PCI-E x16 slot.

Im guessing you got a Dell E520.

[Evilboy]

Good guess...I DID get a E520. Although, now that I've done more research, it seems that the 305 watt PS is pretty standard for the E520... :rolleyes:

Anyway...how feasible would it be to upgrade my PS? I was under the impression that one usually has to get a new case with a PS change, but again, I'm not the most up-to-date on PC building. I know that a good PS isn't really all that expensive, relatively speaking. I'm just worried that my Dell's PS is specially fit to the case. By the way, looking around I can find replacement power supplies for the E520, but all are the 305 watt variety.

Getting back to video cards, what about a smaller upgrade, say to a ATI 1650pro? It's significantly better performance wise, as least for me, but doesn't look to be too much more of a power hit. And the price is great...~$100 or so on the 'net.

Would this be still too much of a draw on my power? The one thing that was a worry is that these cards come with a on-board fan, while my current 1300pro doesn't...

Thanks, all, for the help so far!

[HeadRusch]

The fan will draw power from the board itself, so no need to worry about that.

You can go with a lesser videocard, but again, it comes back to the following equation:
1) What games do you want to play
2) What resolution do you wish to play at
3) What level of eyecandy do you wish to turn on

Some boards can do it, some can't....

[nith]

My game of choice is Titan Quest as well. Originally I had 7600GS SLIed and it didn't hold a candle with Titan Quest with eye candy details. Instead of buying a PS3; I shelled out $550 for 8800GTX to play this game. This card is still having performance issue with TQ especially in a certain area of the game. I don't know if it is a driver issue or bad coding.

I recommend ATI 1950 Pro for the price. Maybe a DX10 card with 8800GTS 320; it's around $280.

[Trebuken]

Most power supplies are the same form factor. You should be able to change it without any problems. You just need to unplug everything, then unscrew old supply, screm in new supply, and plug everything back in.

There are differences in power connectors with SATA stuff, but many supplies come with adapters, and they are cheap enough purchased separate.

You can get a power supply fairly cheaply up to about 650W; higher than that and there is a premium. I recently purchased a 650W supply for about $40 after rebate. I believe it was on clearance. Many manufacturers (I believe) are upgraded their supplies with SATA power connections rather than the traditional 4 pin connectors...

Spend as much as you can on your video card if your a gmaer, it is the number one priority in any system.

[kenny_dope]

Does Dell use standard sized PSUs though? I remember trying to upgrade Compaq & Dell PCs a few days ago and regular PSUs wouldn't fit. Not sure if they still do that though but you might wanna check the dimensions of the PSU mounting.

If you can hold off another month Nvidia / AMD will be releasing $200 DX10 cards -if you can, I'd do that, otherwise an X1950 or 7900GT would be fine.

[Evilboy]

Well, thanks for all the advice!

What I ended up going with was a XFX GeForce 7600GT "Fatal1ty" edition card. This card, cheesy game pro endorsement aside, is overclocked to 650Mhz and also has a passive cooling system--no fan. There are lots of positive reviews around the 'net, with some of the points being that it actually runs cooler than the normal fan-cooled 7600GT card, and that it works fine in systems with 300 watt power supplies.

Anyway, the point is that I now can run TQ in 1028x768 (I'm easy to please) with all settings and AA set to max and it runs quite smooth overall. I'm pretty happy, and the card cost in the ~$140 range from a well-known online retailer, which I was okay with.

For reference, as far as the amount of improvement I got:

3D Mark06 w/ Radeon 1300pro: ~1801

3D Mark06 w/7600GT: ~3817.

For me, this will do just fine.

[HeadRusch]

Just a FYI, AA doesn't really improve all that much once you go beyond 4x.....so if you go 6x or 8x you're killing the card but not getting much visual benefit, thats why most benchmarks use 4x8x as a standrd for benchmarking (4xaa, 8xaf).

personally I dont see a difference between 4x AF and 8xAF either...so I try to run 4x4x.

Since you said 1024x768, does this mean you're using a CRT display? If so, try bumping up the rez a little bit and backing off the AA..AA tends to soften the picture up due to blending of sharp angular lines, so you might be better off trying 1280x1024, say, with 4xaa...

Good Luck

[kenny_dope]

No matter what, you want your games ideally to play at your LCD's native resolution

[kylebisme]

Since you said 1024x768, does this mean you're using a CRT display? If so, try bumping up the rez a little bit and backing off the AA..AA tends to soften the picture up due to blending of sharp angular lines, so you might be better off trying 1280x1024, say, with 4xaa...

A higher 4:3 resolution like 1280x960 might be better, but changing the aspect ratio isn't rightly going to help.

No matter what, you want your games ideally to play at your LCD's native resolution
Certianly not, given a decent scaler, any PC game will look better running at higher than the native resolution of the display. And running lower than native with all the bells and whistles on can also look better than having to turn them off to get native res running smooth.

[Evilboy]

So, based in part by HeadRusch's suggestion, I played around with the settings. I pushed the rez up to 1280x1024, turned off AA (only one setting, on/off) and reduced shadows to medium. All else stayed set to max.

First, the game just looks SO much better. I have a 1280x1024 LCD monitor...yeah I know all about native rez rules and I almost always try to follow them, this time I just figured I'd take the quality hit to get more frames.

I shouldn't have worried, with AA turned off (honestly at the new rez I don't notice it) and shadows down to medium (don't really miss that either) the game actually runs smoother than it ever did. And, it looks way better too...at the monitor's native setting the colors and details just pop seeing as there's no scaling artifacts.

One other thing I did was check the config file...according to stuff I've read, Titan Quest doesn't support dual-cores very well, and there's a setting in the config: "forcesingleprocessormode". This was set to FALSE, I set it to true (to force use of only one core), and the performance shot up quite a bit.

Go figure.

[kenny_dope]

Certianly not, given a decent scaler, any PC game will look better running at higher than the native resolution of the display. And running lower than native with all the bells and whistles on can also look better than having to turn them off to get native res running smooth.

I said "ideally". A lot of LCDs don't scale very well at all, even my 2407WFP looks noticeably different at 1680x1050. Forcing an LCD to run at higher than rated resolutions is also a bit of a bet on the outcome.

A couple of Ifs in your statement there -I know which one I'd prefer but each to their own.