recommended video card

Hi there folks;

I spent a good deal of my weekend looking through the forums looking for answers to the questions I have. I learned a lot but not the specific information I'm looking for.

SL has a maximum draw distance of 512 meters. I you set your computer to that setting a whole new world opens up to you. The problem is my computer won't do much over the default 64 meters. I suspect this is because of the ATI 9250 video card that I have which I believe has 128 MB of ram.

So my questions are. Is it the video card? Or could it be the P4 2.8 ghz processor? The system has 2 gigs of ram and the video card bus is AGP. What upgrades should I make to get the maximum experience from SL.

I am planning to build a new system in the fall so I may decide not to do anything with my current system at this time. I am a highly experienced computer tech however I've never been much of a gamer so I never paid to much attention to video card development.

Thanks for any and all input.
RT

A new video card will make a world of difference, your processor and RAM specs are pretty good. Pick up a good nVidia 7000 series like a 7600, you can get decent priced ones for AGP still I think, and you won't be out a lot before you upgrade and the card is useless to you.

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should be pretty good, but dont quote me on the 512 meters, altho it has the hosepower and the ram to do it

that heatsink is nice, and not too expensive, i have the older model (all copper) on my 6600GT, it instantly cut the noise in half, while running full speed, and dropped the gpu temp by 40 degrees (c)

which was good for an extra 15fps without overclocking, ... but i overclocked anyways and it still runs 10 degrees cooler than the stock heatsink

took about 20 min to install properly

When you do that, add RAM!

Some places I go in SL the game's RAM appetite tops out at over 1Gb. I also found that there are good and bad cards with apparently the same model name, actually made by different card-fabricators. Pick something with cooling on it and ideally an aux power connector - I got a faster 7000-series Nvidia over the weekend and it was the purest fluke that the power connector in it's ass matched the supply lead inside my Dell!

Eh run SL with 512 view distance and you will run into seriously lag after awhile , SL caches more textures to ram it'll be one sloooow experience after awhile, if youre below 2gig ram dont try it really.

recommended view distance would be 128-256 , can be run without to much slowdown, 512 will eat your ram alive after a few tp's.


If you plan on upgrading pc , get a 8800 card 320mb + ,very quiet but you wont need a heater anymore : p

Huge diffrence in noise from my 7900pcie to 8800gt, tho i wont run vista (bunch of crap that is) since nothing yet uses dx10 thats on 8x00's.

Gotta go with Thili on this one! I LOVE my 8800 GTS!!!!

Any current "high end" PC Game..... ALL graphic settings MAXXED!!