Need some advise with getting a new video card
 

Hey guys I'm looking to pickup a new video card for my rig. I'm currently running a 512meg ati x1650 pro, and am looking to go up into a DX10 card. I've narrowed my choises to a Nvida 8600 GT OC, or an ati HD 2600 pro. Both with 512meg DDR2. Price is an issue thats why i've narrowed it down to these to cards. I know the Nvida card will nudge out the ati card in performance but not my much and the ati card is a little cheeper. What do you guys think. anybody running these cards? if so what do you think of them?

http://www.tomshardware.com/2008/01/...ics/page2.html

Something you might want to read

A little more money then the 8600 OC, but well worth it....
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814130082

Hi,

I currently run the ATI Sapphire 2600 HD Pro (AGP version) and have no issues with playing SH4. I also believe the agp version is slightly slower than the pci-e card.

If in doubt, check the cards rating on the resolution you use most to give you some idea which would suit you best.

If you are looking for the ATI Sapphire 2600 HD Pro 512mb i bought mine from Play.com.. £59 inc delivery

Hm...that DDR2 memory thing I just can't take my eyes from. At best, what you'll get from either card (moreso from the nVidia, really) is a slight increase in frame rate and working sun halo. In other words, I don't really think it's worth upgrading to any of those cards. Save some more money and aim for the amazing nVidia 8800GT, if your computer can handle it. Which brings me to my second concern: what CPU and how much RAM do you have? Having a 2-year-old 3GHz processor with 1 GB of RAM will bottle-neck your performance, no matter how good the graphics card is.

Ouch!!!!!!
 

The Tom's Hardware article says the 8600 is only a slight improvement over a 7600GT. Just THINK of all the poor people "upgrading" to a card where they can't tell the difference, spending $150 to get 45 fps instead of 30 and then not being able to see the difference, and not having any detectable difference in game play. And with 7600GT's at $75, you can buy 2 and SLI them for I'll bet better performance. Stay tuned for when I get two healthy ones together in the same place. :rotfl:

I agree with DrBeast. The 8800GT is more than twice as quick as the 7600GT and twice as quick as the 8600. That means you can tell the difference and you will not have spent a little less money for no gain that you can demonstrate aside from printing out some meaningless numbers.

Unless your primary motivation is getting DX10 right now, it would be very easy to be disappointed with the result of making the planned buy.

I'm running a Pentium D so it's duel core at 3mhz each, (6mhz together) so it's pretty good, not as good as core 2 running at 3 mhz, 2 gigs ram with room to go up to 4 when vista gets installed. getting a 8800 would mean getting a new power supply which is something i would dread having to install (mean removing the fan for my cpu). I'm not just looking into getting a new card for silent hunter but for Flightsim too. Ever try landing a plane with just 15fps it gets a little dicey.

NVIDIA GeForce Suggestions?
 

I'm also looking into upgrading!!! I currently have a GeForce 6150 LE integrated graphics card and want to get a stand-alone PCI Express x16 NVIDIA GeForce graphics card that will be able to run Silent Hunter 4 with no problems. I'm also planning on getting a new power supply; either a Antec Earthwatt 430W or a Antec EarthWatt 500W.

On the back of the SH4 box it shows:

Supported Video Cards at time of release:

NVIDIA GeForce 6200 / 6600 / 6800 / 7800.

Does anyone know of any other NVIDIA cards that will work well with SH4?

Thanks

Any of the GeForce 8 series cards will work. I've played it with an 8500GT (okay, but not stellar), and now an 8600GT/OC and that works just fine. An 8800GT would be a great card for SHIV, especially given the price of these (although they are still in a bit of short supply yet).

The ATI 2600 or Nvidia 8600 will probably do you OK on DX9 titles like SHIV, but are barely adequate when dealing with DX10 games. Sure, they're DX10 compatible, but they won't give you decent framerates. This is especially true when you calculate the high resource cost of running Vista in order to get DX10 up.

If you're sticking only with older titles then I'd say you're OK with an 8600 but I don't think either card is a great buy in terms of stepping up to DX10.

Power supply requirements
 

Both the 2600 Pro and 8800GT recommend 400 watt power supplies. EVGA makes a practice of exactly stating what is required, unlike ATi. They say "Minimum of a 400 Watt power supply. (Minimum recommended power supply with +12 Volt current rating of 22 Amp Amps.)"

So there you go. Very little effective difference there. If you now have a 350 watt power supply, it's toast either way.

Why would you have to remove the CPU fan when replacing the power supply? The CPU fan plugs into the motherboard. Believe me, replacing a power supply is not a problem, other than financial.

It took me all of maybe 5-6 minutes to replace my ACER's stock power supply with my Antec. And I wasn't exactly hurrying at that. Unplug, remove old unit, mount new unit, plug in connectors. That's it.

I'm running a 7950gt and I can run everything in high gear.
I get about 45-50 fps on the bridge, it drops to about 30 fps in fog. The only time it gets into the teens is pulling into Pearl.

To answer the question about removing the fan here is a picture of my pc's insides
http://i122.photobucket.com/albums/o...1/P1100001.jpg


it's kinda cramped in there and the black shroud around the fan sticks all the way out and has to be removed to get the power supply out. Sure it'll only take about 5 to 10 min but it's a big pain in the butt.

On that note thanks for all the replys. I do think i'm going to hold off on getting the new card until I can afford something bigger like the new series of ati or an 8800 something

Good thinking. I'm presently running the game on a Asus 8800GT and it is incredible how well it handles this game. I'm getting fps of 60 no matter where or what conditions except for the 2d map. Without tc I get the 60 fps, tc to 2,500 it drops to between 35 to 45 fps. Crank the tc up to its max (8,000 odd) and goes way down to 4 fps. Truly an amazing card and well worth the money.