Need Advice on Video Cards, thread #337,152

I know I know, this has been addressed many times before. But I'm hoping someone feels like responding to this...

I am considering buying a new video card... I have decent performance with my current setup, but I'm always wanting to get a little better... So, can someone just look at these specs and tell me whether it would do me any good to upgrade a card, or should I focus on getting more memory?

I have a Dell System with Win XP, Pentium D CPU 3.00 GHz, 2.99 GHz, 1.00 GB of RAM.

I'm currently using a Leadtek WinFast PX6800TDH Nvidia Geforce PCI-E video card, 256MB, which seems to do ok, but textures seem to take a loong time to load in SL.

I'm wanting to upgrade to a 512 Nvidia Card, maybe a 7900...But, obviously I don't wanna waste 200-300 bucks on a video card if it's really my memory or something else that needs upgrading. I have no idea how to see if my motherboard is good or not...this is a newer comp that was built by Dell last year. It came with a Nvidia 7300LE 1 gig video card, which I switched out because at the time I was playing Sims2 and it wouldn't even run the game. That card doesn't even have a fan, so I'm assuming it wouldn't be much good for SL either.

much thanks for any advice and help in layman's terms.

memory and probably bus speed ( i would think that is a 400mhz max fsb machine) are what are limiting you now i would think, though with a 6800 you cant turn everything up without graphics slowdowns...

in my older machine athlon 2700, 1 gb ram, i put a geforce 7600 agp with 256 mb and it ran the game with quite high settings very well...

with my new machine which has 2 gb of ram and an 8800 640 mb, and an amd 5200 overclocked to 2.730 ghz it runs fine at full graphics settings, except the client itself has such a massive memoryleak...it is funny, start the client, dont even log in, just sitting on the log in screen and check system resources...processor bouncing around 50% and the client process using 77+ mb of memory...

that said, on a machine like you have described...id go with a 7600 or so...

**and yes, im female...i used to do game support for 4 years and learned a lot... mostly from all the quite eager to help and teach nerds i worked with...errr...wait...IM a nerd...rats!

hey Ashley,
thanks for the response! So would you recommend upgrading my RAM to 2 gigs before I spend money on a video card? and are you saying that purchasing anything above a 7600 card would be a waste of money?

I'm running an Nvidia 8600GT with 256 DDR3 and 620mb. I only have 1.5 gigs of DDR2 system RAM with a P4 dual core 3.0 gig CPU. I can turn up the sliders to max and still run fairly good (20 frames per sec). CPU is only running about 50% usage and RAM usage is about 700 megs (roughly 50%).

I'm not sure what it is that makes my system run better than most.........I recently upgraded my video card from an Nvidia 6200LE. The only apparent gain I got was the FPS jumped from 5 to 10 to 40 (with sliders mid range on most settings). I would say go for the card over RAM. 1 gig is not that much less than the gig and a half I have. At least you will notice more fluid movement of the game and detail will be better. Shop around......I got my 8600GT for $138 USD at a computer fair last weekend.

RAM is pretty cheap so you mebbe try that first. If it works, you win. If not, it's not gonna break the bank and new card + more ram is gonna be better than new card + no ram anyway.

Also though, how's your net connection? If you don't have the bandwidth to download those textures, it's gonna be slow no matter what you have under the hood.

This makes sense, thanks for your reply. I have a cable internet connection that just registered 1,652.5 kbps, that's pretty good, ain't it?

As mentioned before, my performance doesn't suck... in low lag areas i can get up to 50 fps. In laggier areas though, it drops to 8-15fps. The slow texture loading is the worst part. I hate the progressive texture loading where I'm staring at fuzziness for however many seconds. Maybe this is everyone's experience, but for instance I went to Textures R Us last night and some of the textures took over 2 minutes to even load past the grey nothingness (and that's after being in the store well over twenty minutes). Granted there are a million textures to load there, but it still annoyed me.

I will look into some more RAM, as you say, it can't hurt... thank you

thanks again for EVERYONE's replies!

both would help...with an older machine another GB of ram will be maybe 40$ , need make sure it is identical in specifications to whats in there...as mentioned...SL running is eating around 700 mb of ram, give the OS some and any other running processes...and a gigabyte gets eaten up completely awful quickly...

depending on the memory one more 1 gb stick would run 40-70$...may want to open the case first and check...if it has one gb probably they used two 512mb sticks...and could only have 2 slots! ...

if the machine is AGP a decent card will run 130$ or so...

if pci express, you can even go with a 8600gt for 115$ or so
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130085

I would go with any make or model of an Nvidia 7600. It's the best bang for the bucks.

I put an EVGA AGP 256MB 7600GT in my wife's 8 year old Dell (upgraded to 2.6GHz a few years ago) that only has 512MB RDRAM, and she gets acceptable frame rates of 25-35 on average.

If you find a really good deal on a 7600, you might want to consider also increasing your RAM to 2GB if you can afford it. SL is a *HUGE* memory hog in heavily textured locations. (Unless you have the Nicholaz Edition viewer.)

I agree that you will probably get far more bang for your buck with adding a gig of memory first before going after the graphics card.