9800 gtx replacement advice please

[Roach75]

Ok, so now I've been introduced a the local mod I'll ask again

any advice on upgrading my 9800GTX

I'm running WinXP 32bit on a P5N32-e SLI Plus with an Intel core 2 Duo 3.0Ghz and 4gb ram

 

[stant1rm]

What do you want to do? Assuming gaming is the reason, what's your budget? If you're any where in the $200-$300 range, AMD is your best bet, they just announced large price cuts and you can get some very powerful cards cheap. The HD 7850 is about $200, the HD 7870 is $250 and the HD 7950 is $290.

 

[zakiizzuddin]

asus 660ti direct cuii top will do the job.

 

[stant1rm]

asus 660ti direct cuii top will do the job.

Yeah, no. The GTX 660 Ti is not a great card anyway. The 192bit Memory Bandwidth hurts performance even at 1920x1080. The HD 7870 is slightly faster, and $60 cheaper and the HD 7950 is much faster and $10 cheaper. Why would you even recommend that?

 

[Roach75]

Yes, gaming is the priority, I play mostly DX9 era game, will be building a PC for later games soon so I'm only looking to improve on the 9800GTX, my monitor will only go up to 1440 x 900.

Playing IL2, Silent hunter 3 and Rome Total War at the mo. Will move on to high end gaming with the new build, hopefully R2TW.

I'm not familiar with the ATI series cards, and I wonder how well they'd work with my motherboard, would I need to update the BIOS? And how easy is it to clean the Nvidia drivers off the system?

 

[stant1rm]

It is extremely easy to remove the old drivers. In fact I do it even if I upgrade from one nVidia card to another. Just uninstall the old drivers like any other program using the Add/Remove Programs tool and then download and run the program "Driver Sweeper" http://phyxion.net/item/driver-sweeper.html .

Then just download and install the latest drivers from AMD. AMD has made up some ground in recent years on nVidia in GPU performance and generally they are neck and neck. I don't really prefer one to the other. My current card is the EVGA GTX 690 because it was such an incredibly engineered and designed card. Before that I had 3 Radeon HD 6970's in TriFire (Really a 6990+ 6970), and they performed great and scaled performance really well. But It was a loud and noisy setup.


http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-review,3107.html

Here is the chart from Tom's that goes into detail on the best cards for the money. You'll see AMD dominates the list, mostly due to some incredible price cuts.

 

[Roach75]

Those 7750s are looking good, they are PCIe 3.0 though, does it matter that my M'board is only PCIe 2.0 or are they backwards compatible?

 

[stant1rm]

You are correct, 3.0 cards are backwards compatible with 2.0. I would get at least the HD 7770 for $10 more then the HD 7750, it will net a good bit more performance.

 

[Roach75]

Superb, will investigate those more, thanks for the advice, much appreciated.

 

[stant1rm]

Absolutely, good luck!