New graphics card.

[MadMaffMan]

I have a Gainward nVidea 5700 Ultra with 128mb at the moment but the poor ol' girl is starting to struggle with the newer games, especially the new FPS's like F.E.A.R and BF2.

I now hardly anything about tech stuff so i thought i'd ask for some help here, whats a good graphics card to go for that wont break the bank, my budget is about £160. My m8 said to go for this one

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products ... _uid=90090

I have no idea if this is any good, its cheap thats a plus but is it much better than my current card????
The rest of my system is a P4 3Gig with 1 Gig of memory if thats any help.

[IBBoard]

I've got a Radeon X800XT, and that seems nicely powerful. Unless ATi did something strange with their naming then the X700 should either be a small step below or the previous incarnation/chipset to the X800, I think. If you've got a budget of £160, I'd probably try to push it a bit more. A £60 graphics card is one that's likely to be dropping off the low end of gaming or more intended for the casual gamer. Also, if your mobo supports it then go for PCI-e over AGP - it has much better transfer rates and is an updated version of PCI, but older motherboard won't support it.

The best place I've found for comparisons is a place called Tom's Hardware. They've got a X700 review from September 2004 and it seems to beat a GeForce 6600. There's also an old archive of test results, although all of the newer ones are PCI-e. I'd check those out and see what you can find

[TGSC]

I'm dissapointed that, being on a laptop with shared memory, I can't get my graphics memory above about 64meg, I never found anywhere to set it, it says its dynamic, and it manages to play UT2003, MOHAA, The Movies and other things on medium settings fairly happily but AoE3 asked for 64meg of graphics memory minimum, I'm gonna be screwed when I want to put the next generation of graphics heavy games on it (FPSs, Black & White2).

I also seem to fill my disk up, I tried installing The Movies the other day and I had about 1GB of free space on my 30MB disk

[IBBoard]

I managed to crop a good chunk of space out of my disk the other day (about a gig and a half) by removing lots of junk from Windows (backups for patches that I know are working, uninstallers for the SP1 pack)....although a big chunk was saved by moving one of Abi's Sims 2 expansions to another drive as well :\

Laptops do tend to have problems with graphics cards, though. That's why it's best to get a desktop for a gaming machine. Memory can be upgraded, but is expensive and awkward to get at. Disks can be upgraded but cost more than a standard desktop disk. The main problem, if The Sims 2's manual is anything to go by, is that although the laptop might have a good enough grahpics card on paper, they seem to cut it down a little for heat reasons and so some games say "it might work on a mobile chipset, but we're not promising that it will".

[TGSC]

I found a gig and a bit of Temporary internet files, and the Temp folder was a gig and a half, I hope I didn't need any of it.

Also, the Kodak webcam has given up the ghost, so a cheap, crap digi cam that I can use to take photos out and about and use as a webcam may be in order for xmas. Cheapest I've seen so far is an actual digi cam for £40, ~3Mpix, 4xdigital zoom, 1.5" screen, SD card I think, but there's probably cheaper.

EDIT: Off to see SW:E3 at the Union now