Computer Graphics Cards

[VladTepes]

So Im looking at the gaming PC’s on http://www.gamedude.com.au/ (http://www.gamedude.com.au/), and most of the ‘guff” makes some sense to me, so I can probably select a system that would suit.

What I need/want to know is what Graphics cards I should be aiming at.

Want one that will cope with current games (like COD series) and not need replacing within the next few years, with any luck.

I really haven’t kept up with this sort of thing so advice happily appreciated.

[Distortion]

Really need to know how much your looking to spend.

My personal preference is for the Nvidia Cards so I would suggest a GTX570/580

Whatever you choose I would suggest checking carefully the power requirements particularly what amps your powersupply can provide over a 12v rail vs the requirement for the card.

I ended up needing a new powersupply for my gtx480 despite having a 1000w because it could only do 30A per rail and the card needed 50A or something like that can't remember the exact numbers now

[VladTepes]

was looking at the 1500-1900 $ gaming systems on that gamedude site.

Cards are speced as

nVidia GTX-570 PCI Express video card
ATi 6870 High Performance PCIexpress Video card

[Pedro_The_Swift]

Either one is fine Vlad,,
my 570 GTX OC runs fine on my (good quality) 560w PSU,,

I'd want an Intel i5 or better,, (amd are not in the game atm,,)

you may want to look at your monitor specs with those cards--:eek::cool:

as always,, Toms Hardware gives you all the info,,,

[VladTepes]

Toms Hardware ?



Hmm i didn;t think there would be any compatability issues with an older monitor... will it still work but perhaps just not take advantage of the cards capability.

[999]

I would not have a clue what GPU is good anymore but if you check out the Wiki on whirlpool it may give you an idea Gaming Machine Configurations (http://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/rmp_sg_whirlpoolpcs_gaming_configs_1)


(http://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/rmp_sg_whirlpoolpcs_gaming_configs_1)

[Pedro_The_Swift]

"but perhaps just not take advantage of the cards capability."
not really much point then--



does your monitor have either of these connectors?
(yes those two are the same)
https://www.aulro.com/afvb/images/imported/2011/09/1064.jpg

[VladTepes]

Either :lol2:

Would that be a dreded HDMI cable ?

I'm not sure but wil havea look.

If not, whats a new monitor worth?

[damo_s]

Hi Vlad,

Post up some specs of the systems you are looking at so i can give you some advice!

If you want to future proof, then you have to spend big, unfortunately. If you go mid range (~$500 card) then you will get about 2 years out of it.

Games are developing so quickly and using so much system power that if you dont buy the best (or very close to) you will need to upgrade sooner or later, if you are a serious gamer.

For example, i bought an ATi HD5870 last year. It will be touch and go as to whether i will be able to play Battlefield 3 later this year when its released. However, if i had spent $300 extra and gone the better card, i wouldn't be having this trouble now!

[VladTepes]

"but perhaps just not take advantage of the cards capability."
not really much point then--



does your monitor have either of these connectors?
(yes those two are the same)
http://techiser.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/nVidia-GeForce-GTX-570-SLI-Graphic-Card-Ports.jpg

Hmm my monitor has a plug like that but I think it has 3 rows of pins ?

[Pedro_The_Swift]

is it like this--
https://www.aulro.com/afvb/images/imported/2011/09/971.jpg

[Pedro_The_Swift]

If not, whats a new monitor worth?

I can reccomend one of these--
Dell UltraSharp (http://accessories.ap.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?c=au&cs=audhs1&l=en&s=dhs&sku=230-11017&redirect=1)

[turkeybrain]

If you're happy to keep using your old screen and it only has the VGA connector (A.K.A. DSUB, the blue one Pedro posted), you can easily get DVI to VGA adapters. They're $5 or so, I've got one on my old screen so I can continue using it as a secondary monitor. I'm not sure if the manufacturers still bother, but a lot of graphics cards used to come with a DVI to VGA adapter bundled in the box.

[Rosscoe68]

gamedude are cheap parts, but absolutely atrocious service. don't expect any support from them and if you need to send anything for warranty expect big delays as all warranty is handled by the suppliers and or manufacturers, they will not warranty swap anything for you even if it is less than 24 hours old. "it will need to be sent back to the supplier for exchange"
been there, never again.



p.s. didnt realise i had my cranky pants on today until i reread my post :)

[VladTepes]

is it like this--
https://www.aulro.com/afvb/images/imported/2011/09/971.jpg

Yes but therels another different plug next to it.

[VladTepes]

Yeah com[aring here
Monitor Cable Connectors (http://www.computerplug.com/connectors_mon.php)
it is I am pretty sure a DVI plug.

[turkeybrain]

That's not at all uncommon on screens built in the last 3 years. If you want to save money there's really no reason to upgrade. That being said you'll find screen prices are much cheaper than they have been in the past, you can get some good quality screens with a large size and plenty of input options for around $300.

There's a good write up on screens in the October issue of PC Power Play. It covers the different technology types, what they're good at, what price you can expect to pay and also reviews some screens too. There's also some info in a different article on what they think is a good computer configuration for a given budget ($1000, $2000, $3000 and money no object), it sounds like that could be helpful for you as well.

[Warb]

I grew up playing computer games, starting with the BBC micro and ending up with water cooled overclocked stupidities. The worst aspect of using a PC to play games (or possibly the best, depending on how you look at it) is that the hardware changes so fast.

In the 90's I bought a Play Station. All my Play Station games still work on it. Since then there have been 2 new versions of the Play Station. As far as I know, most if not all PS1 games will play on the latest PS3.

In the same time, PC's have undergone a vast number of changes. Almost no component of a 90's PC will work in a 2011 model. Even 5 year old hardware is largely incompatible with current production. Most new PC games will struggle on hardware that was top of the line even 2 years ago. Equally, most 90's games will refuse to work at all, or require a great deal of tweaking to run on a 2011 PC.

So the choice becomes either buy "the best" and get perhaps 2 years of new games, buy "average" and hope that the current crop of games will play, or buy a console and know that any games produced for that console will work..........

Considering that most games these days seem to come out on all platforms (except Wii), the sensible money would be on the latest version of an XBox or Play Station.

If you must have a PC, remember that most graphics cards based on a given chip are pretty much the same "reference design". So whilst two brands may vary in price, they may be basically the same card with different stickers.

An NVIDIA GTX580 powered card is about the best "single processor" unit you can get, the dual processor cards are far more money and few current games use them to any degree (and they're out of stock, almost all brands, at the moment!). Find a brand with a good price on an GTX580 (try Palit).

Then stick it on a motherboard with an Intel Z68 Express chipset with an i7 2600K processor and about 8Gb of DDR3 (1600+) RAM. A couple of WD Caviar Black drives, a Blu-Ray drive, a 1000W+ PSU and bingo... Gaming! you'll just about scrape that lot for $1500-$1700, but you'll also need a case and a copy of Windows.

Just don't buy a new Microsoft Touch Mouse. The worst mouse I've ever used....

[Rosscoe68]

interesting post Warb,
just finished reading some developers blurb on Deus Ex Human Revolution and they were complaining about the hardware not being up to spec so they could make the game as they wished, so what was released i gather isnt as full on as they had hoped. That's kinda scary in a way and goes along with what you are saying.

As a computer saleperson i usually recommend people not to buy top of the line as even top of the line is already out of date as soon as it hits the market, i recommend to buy what works now and suits the budget and then concern yourself with whats in the future when the future becomes the present.
most people upgrade pc's in the 2 - 3 yr range anyhow, and by that time when all the new games are out the new hardware will hopefully be out as well.

just whatever you do, don't make the mistake of buying a PC that is going to last you for the next 5 - 10 years as i commonly have people wanting to do. ( ok if you don't change what you are going to do with it in the next 5 - 10 years you might get away with that, but can you promise that's definate ? )
i myself upgrade roughly every 18 months, i buy mid range where you get the best bang for buck.
my current game pc is a Toshiba laptop, and its only got a NV GT330m 1gb card, but plays all games i play at a good frame rate and good resolution (including Deus Ex HR), sure not as good as some high end machines, but hey, are we buying pc's to use? or are we buying machines to impress other people with stupid high end specs? :)

[Warb]

Off topic:

An interesting question to consider is why is all the new horsepower actually needed? Certainly some games have complex graphics that need power to run at high frame rates, but.....

In the mid 90's I was told by Microsoft that they had taken their software about as far as it could go. Whilst they were working on information storage that did not require the user to know where a file was, which I guess ended up as "libraries" in Windows 7 and "the cloud" on the internet, they stated that there was little more they could do to add functionality. As a result, they were working only on the "user experience", ease of use and appearance.

Add to this the fact that in the old days (!) we used to be concerned with maximising performance of software, given that we had limited CPU cycles and storage to play with. Then came the "4GLs". I remember using one to rewrite a big month-end suite on an HP mini computer using Image databases, it took a few days for me to replace a system that had taken a team of COBOL programmers months to code. It was so simple to code a data entry system, I could knock out a bespoke sales system for a national company in days - a prototype could be produced during a meeting, so the users could actually see what they would get. But almost instantly we had to add hardware......... those wonderful old HP 300Mb hard disks the size of a bar fridge (remember the computer room scene in Terminator 2?) were replaced with HP "Eagles". In the late 80's or early 90's I walked in to the office with a brand new 300Mb drive the size of a ciggie packet and people fainted - the 1985 IBM AT had a 5 1/4inch full height hard disk of 10MB!!

Then later (contracting to a pharmaceutical company) I was astounded to be told that a new system from a contract software house needed several GB of RAM to run. By modern standards that doesn't seem a great deal, but the previous system had run on a system with far less, and servers of that era were considered fairly top-end if they had more than 512Mb!. Eventually the system was run using terminal server because in client-server mode it used more network bandwidth than could be provided.

The exponential increase in hardware performance has, I suspect, removed any pretext of optimising code performance. Every new version of an OS, or a piece of software, demands more storage, more CPU, more RAM etc. But a word processor still only types letters.....

However, a gentleman to whom I supplied a PC maybe 15 years ago is still happily using it without any problems. If it goes wrong he's stuffed (unless I happen to have spare parts!) but apart from that his copy of Windows 95 still plods along allowing him to record whatever it is he puts in his Excel spreadsheets. It works as well now as it did when it was new. He's lucky enough not be be interested in the internet, or games, or constantly upgrading to get more colours.....

[haydent]

check out toms hardware graphics charts for comparisons: Benchmarks 2011 Gaming Graphics Charts (http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2011-gaming-graphics-charts/benchmarks,123.html)

[Pedro_The_Swift]

Toms is a great site:cool:


I wonder how many people the world over Google hardware and come up with video cards:Rolling:


and,,

I just spelled google with a small "g"
and firefox underlined it for correction,,
the correction was a CAPITAL g

and I think firefox will be the same
:Rolling::Rolling:

[Rosscoe68]

but its not so obviously Google is superior to firefox

[Pedro_The_Swift]

just to upset you console types---
the comparison pics are very telling,,,
NVIDIA Talks PC Gaming Trends: Introduction - Techgage (http://techgage.com/article/nvidia_talks_pc_gaming_trends/)

[Warb]

But remember that this is the opinion of a PC site, using information and "trend analysis" supplied by a PC graphics chip manufacturer..... Hardly unbiased!

However, I do agree with the sentiment that new PC games can always be better than console games, simply because they can be written for the new hardware. A console may sell basically unchanged for perhaps 5+ years, where a top flight PC component is lucky to hold it's position for 6 months, and will be largely obsolete in 3 years. It is therefore inevitable that the latest greatest PC will be better than a console.

Unfortunately that also means that unless the PC is upgraded every year, it will struggle to run the latest games, whilst a console will run every game produced for it. Additionally, where the console will run any game thrown at it, then the next, then the next, the PC will probably require reconfiguring, is very likely to crash because of some minor incompatibility, and in doing so is quite capable of losing all your email and personal files. Have you ever seen a recommendation to reinstall the OS of a PlayStation from scratch every year?

The decision is therefore whether to buy a PC and accept that you have a choice of the games currently available but that any future games may give poor performance, or a console and know that until that console is superceded every game released will work acceptably on it.

My (young) kids have a Wii, because it has the best selection of kids games. They also have my PS1, which still runs all the PS1 games, and an XP PC, which runs some PC games (not really old ones, nor really new ones!).

I have a fairly top-flight PC which would run all the latest games at blazing speeds (if I played games!) but will not play the stack of 90's and early 2000's games I have in my cupboard.

If I had a PS3 it would, as far as I know, play every game ever written for the PlayStation platform. Maybe not quite as impressively as the latest greatest PC, but in 15 years I would have bought three pieces of hardware - PS1/2/3 - rather than a completely new PC (or significant component upgrades) every 12 months! And from memory the PS3 cost $700 or so either at or shortly after its launch, which is about the same as the graphics card in my PC - and that card requires replacing every year if I want to keep up with the new software!

[sheerluck]

......If I had a PS3 it would, as far as I know, play every game ever written for the PlayStation platform. Maybe not quite as impressively as the latest greatest PC, but in 15 years I would have bought three pieces of hardware - PS1/2/3 - rather than a completely new PC (or significant component upgrades) every 12 months! And from memory the PS3 cost $700 or so either at or shortly after its launch, which is about the same as the graphics card in my PC - and that card requires replacing every year if I want to keep up with the new software!

A little off topic, but only the old version of the PS3 (the "fatty", not the new slimline one) will pay PS1/2/3 games.

That's evolution for you.