Upgrading NVidia vs Radeon

[Ducttapesamurai]

I'm looking to upgrade my computer so it's a better gaming rig. I showed a spec sheet of my desktop to a salesman at Best Buy, and he told me that since I have a AMD 64 x2 dual 4600+, I would be better off going with a Radeon product than an Nvidia product.

I currently have a GeForce 8500 GT. The Best Buy guy didn't say it, but he implied that an Nvidia card wouldn't be fully compatible with an AMD processor. Is there a reason this wouldn't be fully optimized?

The only other real problem I have is lack of RAM, which is at the top of my upgrade list as I only have 2GB.

I'm running Windows 8, and am planning on using this comp primarily for Minecraft and Guildwars2.

 

[gsxrme]

Personal Preference. Both AMD and Nvidia at this point is dollar for dollar throwing blows at each others games. Find your price point and go

 

[HillBillyAsian]

no, either nvidia or amd will work just fine, the guy who suggested that either is trying to upsell you on a higher priced product or is going by lack of experience. a upgrade to at least 4gb of ram would indeed be helpful since you would be running a newer operating system.

 

[JackNaylorPE]

What grade was the salesman in ? My guess is the salesman is parotting something he heard from one of his fronds or "read on the internet". In my experience there's no significant difference. Simply put, any card will do better with the "better" CPU. When the load is pushed however, the article below says the nVidia card does better than the AMD card with AMD's best CPU.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/crossfire-sli-scaling-bottleneck,3471-12.html

Our big revelation is that AMD’s FX-8350 performs 5% better in SLI than it does in CrossFire. When all else is made equal, AMD’s current flagship host processor really does favor nVidia's graphics technology. Whoops.

I'd be hard pressed to say that one can take anything away from this "instance" and apply the logic across the board to any other CPU / GPU pairings.

 

[ikaz]

The thing is your PC seems rather old if your running a x2 dual, could you post the rest of your specs like your MB I'm thinking if you do upgrade only your GPU your not going to want to spend money going past a 7750 from AMD or a 650 from Nivida.

 

[ikaz]

Oh your also want make sure the card is running GDDR5 (not DDR3) and any thing over a 1gig of memory would be a waist for those cards so don't pay extra. Heck bumping your memory from 2 to 4gigs may even give you a nice boost since I would think your PC is doing a lot of swaping right now.

 

[Ducttapesamurai]

The thing is your PC seems rather old if your running a x2 dual, could you post the rest of your specs like your MB I'm thinking if you do upgrade only your GPU your not going to want to spend money going past a 7750 from AMD or a 650 from Nivida.

Processor AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4600+ 5.3 4.5
Determined by lowest subscore
Memory (RAM) 2.00 GB 5.5
Graphics NVIDIA GeForce 8500 GT 4.7
Gaming graphics 1279 MB Total available graphics memory 4.5
Primary hard disk 164GB Free (233GB Total) 5.9
Windows 8

System
Manufacturer HP-Pavilion
Model RK574AA-ABA a1730n
Total amount of system memory 2.00 GB RAM
System type 32-bit operating system
Number of processor cores 2
64-bit capable Yes
Storage
Total size of hard disk(s) 233 GB
Disk partition (C 164 GB Free (233 GB Total)
Graphics
Display adapter type NVIDIA GeForce 8500 GT
Total available graphics memory 1279 MB
Dedicated graphics memory 512 MB
Dedicated system memory 0 MB
Shared system memory 767 MB

This PC is a bit old; Got it new when Vista came out. (good riddance to that OS!)
And if I remember right, I believe the Salesman was pointing me towards the DDR3 cards...