[Mitesh]

I upgraded my PC with the components below 3 years ago (my sig). I used it for about a week after building it then havent touched it since. As can be seen the GPU at the time was one of the best costing me £300. Rather a waste as its worthless now. Ok now here is what I want to be able to do:

I am purchasing either a 22 or 24 inch HD screen not sure which size yet or what format (16:10 etc)

I want to be able to play my old games such as Tomb Raider Legend and Annivesary, Hitman Blood Money, Far Cry (with HDR patch), C&C Tiberium Wars, GRAW 2 as well as newer games such as Far Cry 2 etc.

I want to be able to play on max settings at the screens native resolution.

I want to be able to play them at a smooth FPS ideally over 60FPS (Tiberium wars is limited to 30FPS I know).
I will also be using it to watch HD video.

The systems components would bottleneck a new GPU that costs £300+ so I do not think that is such a good idea. My question is would replacing the 8800 GTS I have in the PC at the moment with something low cost such as one of these: http://www.overclock.......&subid=1402 give me a significant improvement in FPS?
How is it possible to tell which new GPU would be bottlenecked by my system?
Also note that my system has a 965P board which if I remember does not have PCI-E 2.0.

A new system build is out of the question as I am spending in excess of £1,000 on re decorating my room and purchasing a new screen etc.

Would it be advisable to wait till I can afford a complete system overhaul before purchasing a GPU? Or would a lower cost GPU be cost-efficient given that I am a student and do not have a job so it would mean getting a job and waiting for about a year to be able to re-build to a nice high spec.

Many Thanks

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Anyone?

[Mitesh]

Anyone?

[Mitesh]

Can someone help me please?

[phillpower2]

Have you tried posting your question in the waiting room?
Its in the GTG discussion section towards the bottom of
the forums page,Im sure someone will pick your question up
there

[happyrock]

that 17 in monitor has a 10msec response time...that is real slow for gaming...
get a monitor with a 5ms or less response time...
go here for some benchmarking on mid range video cards...
look at the 5770 (about $165) and the 5830 around $250...

[Mitesh]

Thanks for your input - if anyone could answer my questions that would be great!

[happyrock]

you don't say what the monitor resolution will be on the new monitor...
you supply a link to the video card that you want to know about that has at least a half dozen other video cards listed
did you want me or someone to research every card listed there...LMGTFY

Edited by happyrock, 06 March 2010 - 10:16 AM.

[Mitesh]

22 inch screens generally hav a resolution of 1680x1050. 24 hav a resolution of 1920x1080. The GPU's I pointed out as a general idea of what sort of money I can spend atm on a GPU. As for googling it this is a problem which is personal there is no one answer as my situation os obv different to that of others ie. my hardware and whther it would be a bottleneck or not. Its more like this requires a custom solution.

Edited by Mitesh, 06 March 2010 - 01:12 PM.

[happyrock]

the GPU is going to do the heavy lifting...none are going to be held back by the CPU...
check each video cards specs to see what resolution they will support or put in the number of the card a + and the word review after it like so...
Point Of View GeForce GTS 250 Green 1024MB + review...
then pick one of the review sites like www.guru3d.com or overclockers.co.uk or some other review site and read to see how the card your looking at stands up to the resolution your thinking about

Edited by happyrock, 06 March 2010 - 04:14 PM.

[Mitesh]

you say the GPU takes the burden however I am a regualr reader of the Custom PC magazine here in the UK; a recent article in which they upgrade PC's of varying ages inclduing one 3 years old just like mine but with diff specs, anyway they tried just upgrading the GPU in it with the highest end ATI card available. They found it didnt perform much better then what was orginally in there - as the other components were severly bottlenecking it.

[happyrock]

They found it didnt perform much better then what was orginally in there - as the other components were severly bottlenecking it.

without knowing what the the other components are...and what similar components you have in your system (if any) we will never know...
go back to the Custom PC magazine and compare the systems they used for the article (component wise) against what you have in your system...


you will want to pay close attention on the 3DMark benchmarking info ...
3DMark Vantage focuses on the two areas most critical to gaming performance: the CPU and the GPU. With the emergence of multi-package and multi-core configurations on both the CPU and GPU side, the performance scale of these areas has widened, and the visual and game-play effects made possible by these configurations are accordingly wide-ranging. This makes covering the entire spectrum of 3D gaming a difficult task. 3DMark Vantage solves this problem in three ways:

1. Isolate GPU and CPU performance benchmarking into separate tests,
2. Cover several visual and game-play effects and techniques in four different tests, and
3. Introduce visual quality presets to scale the graphics test load up through the highest-end hardware.

To this end, 3DMark Vantage has two GPU tests, each with a different emphasis on various visual techniques, and two CPU tests, which cover the two most common CPU-side tasks: Physics Simulation and AI.

Edited by happyrock, 11 March 2010 - 09:32 AM.

[Mitesh]

I no longer have this magazine so I cannot get the details unless someone here has that issue of Custom PC? I do not think they published the results I think it was just text, however I am sure they wrote the FPS etc.