Video Card recommendations

Good to know. July is totally waitable since i'm going not going to be home much come may 7th (for those of you who remember me mentioning that I was pretty much homeless last summer due to partying and working). As long as i get a good deal by oct. everything should be fine. Also keep in mind i dont want to be a part of a tech race and get the best card possible at the moment I just need something thats is good in price and value.
 
Von Drunky said:
I've been looking at the 9600GT and it does not say anything about minimum power requirements. One thing i noticed is that if i get a 9600 (which i actually found for pretty cheap) or 9800 i would have to throw away my 2ndarily monitor because it wont support it. Then again that shit takes up way too much room on my desk so maybe its about time.
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Don't have to throw your old monitor away, most video cards comes with an adapter that lets you put your old CRT monitor to a DVI slot. I would say go for the 9600 GT seems most sites have it for $150 or less. The 8500 GT isn't as good as 9600 GT for video gaming but it will work on you computer. All it needs is 300w which is the norm for all prebuilt computers.

The 9600 GT may need power supply in the range of 400w or more, check how much watts you power supply is call Dell if you need to. Also, like Mord_Sith stated Dells are not very upgrade friendly you may have a hard time putting in the 9600 GT card it is kind of big its about 9 inches long.
 
1GB on a card like that is a useless gimmick, really. You need a 512 bit bus to make the most of it, and the card would need to be faster too.
 
I checked out my power supplely today and found out that I have 375W. I was on the NVIDIA website where you can pick a card based on your budget and power supply and found out that I should go with the 8600 GTS which is not that far behind the 9600 GT and way better then my 7300 LE.
http://www.nvidia.com/HelpMeChoose/fx/HelpMeChoose.asp

With that said i have three questions:

1. The NVIDIA site power supply goes by 50 watts so it could be likely that the 400w needed for the 9600 GT is an estimation since i already have 375W how do you think it would effect performance?

2. Also can anyone recommend which manufacture to buy from (XFX, PNY, does it really matter)?

3. Is there a better video card on the market that is compatible with a 375W power supply?

my apologizes for grave digging.
 
I was looking into a better power supply but i don't think its something i want to deal with. The 8600GTS seems like the only card i can get that will support directX 10. out of curiosity will this power supply stack with my current power supply or does it replace it?

Fucking hell all i need is 25 more watts!

Edit: I'm pretty sure the 8600GTS will hold me over for the next two years, then ill just get a new computer with more power (hopefully I will still have time for gaming).
 
DirectX 10 is bullshit, don't let that affect which card you're buying. Right now all you get with DX10 is a big drop in framerate without any increase in quality. Not to mention that by the time real DX games come out, they'll be using 10.1... and there are no existing nvidia cards that use 10.1.

I strongly STRONGLY recommend against getting an 8600 though.
 
Today I ordered an Evga 8800gt superclock for a decent price. Lets hope it wont fry my computer. A friend of mine has the exact same machine as i do at it seems to be working fine for him.
 
Run this with a skull, glass texture, 16x multisampling @ whatever your max res is; Along with this with the 'small FFTs' test at the same time for ~8 hours.

If you don't bluescreen or get a low power warning, you aren't going to have a problem during gaming.
 
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