Upgrading my graphics card

G

Guest

I have recently been thinking about upgrading my graphics card to a superior
card. I have seen the XFX GeForce 6800 GT 256MB DDR3 TV-Out/Dual DVI AGP for
around £170-£200 and the specs are:

Chipset - GeForce 6800 GT
Memory - 256 MB
Bus Type - AGP 8X
Memory Type - DDRIII
Memory Bus - 256-bit
Output - Dual DVI
Highlighted Features - TV Out
Graphics Core - 256-bit
Memory Interface - 256-bit
Pixels per Clock (peak) - 16
Textures per Pixel - 16
RAMDACs - 400 MHz
Memory Bandwidth - 32 GB/sec
Vertices Per Second - 525 Million
Fill Rate - 5.6 Billion Texels/sec

My current computer runs XP service pack 2, Intel Pentium 4 2.6 mHz, with
512MB memory and a 105GB hard drive.

Is this enough to cope with the new card or do you recommend more memory
because when running a lot of applications, i get the "virtual memory is
running out" bubblebox all the time.

While on the subject on graphics cards, my current computer came with a
Radeon 9200 AGP 128MB graphics card. Will the new card make a major
improvement?

Thanks in advance for any info, much appreciated
 
J

John Barnett MVP

Andy what are you doing with your pc? If you are a gamer i can understand
the 'all singing, all dancing' video card but if you are just doing the
usual mundane operations like word processing, photo editing etc i see
nothing wrong with the card you already have. you know the old saying 'if it
ain't broke, don't fix it.' If we left everything to the software and
peripheral manufacturers' we would be buying new software and hardware every
other day.
 
M

Mike Hall \(MS-MVP\)

Andy

Unless you are a gamer, upgrading to that kind of video card will make zero
difference to performance in general terms..

You would do better to spend the money on software..
 
P

Phillips

Better double your RAM (since you run many apps)... let the AGP prices come
down - cause of the new yet slow PCI Express and SLI (dual) cards.
The graphics card you want is fancy enough to play most recent games... but
it will be obsolete in 1 year or so; besides, you need a good monitor to
complement the card - and a good one sells for a few hundred quids at the
least.
To answer your question, yes, you can run it on your machine. Better yet,
google for graphics cards reviews and check a few sites - they are not all
objective reviewers.
You can start here: http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20050705/
Michael
 
B

BP

I had an Asus Radeon 9800 pro 256MB card in my machine. The fans died and I
had to sent it back RMA. In the 6 weeks I was waiting for the card to be
returned I bought and installed an ATI Radeon 9200. I have found no
difference in performance between the two cards. Granted, I'm not playing
beta versions of cutting edge games either. But for everything else, no
difference.
 

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