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Is this a good video card upgrade?


zircon
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I currently use a Geforce en7600gs video card. It's fanless and does everything I need, but I want to upgrade to make Team Fortress 2 a little smoother - also, I think some of my plugins are running a bit slow because my graphics card is having trouble keeping up.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814500019&cm_sp=DailyDeal-_-14-500-019-_-Homepage

Would this be a good buy? Would I get a decent power upgrade?

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I currently use a Geforce en7600gs video card. It's fanless and does everything I need, but I want to upgrade to make Team Fortress 2 a little smoother - also, I think some of my plugins are running a bit slow because my graphics card is having trouble keeping up.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814500019&cm_sp=DailyDeal-_-14-500-019-_-Homepage

Would this be a good buy? Would I get a decent power upgrade?

With regard to the "should I upgrade" question, I've found this chart to be fairly useful. It shows the 9600GT as being 10 tiers above the 7600GS.

That said, this chart is actually part of a monthly feature TH does called "Best Video Cards for the Money." Their <$100 section suggests the 9600GSO, HD4670, and HD3650. The 9600GSO is a bit cheaper and is only one tier lower. It actually performs roughly equal with the GT at lower resolutions because it has more stream processors, from what I've read.

The HD4670 is about the same price as this 9600GT, but what may interest you is that it has an onboard soundcard with 7.1 LPCM support via HDMI. So if you've got an extra-fancy surround setup you could get Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD signals without them getting downsampled by the S/PDIF passthrough. Not to mention it would save you a lot of cabling.

The HD3650 borders on a joke recommendation, but you really can't beat the price at $35, and according to the hierarchy table it's actually 3 tiers above your current card. :< So if you're on a *really* tight budget you might consider it. (Plus it comes with WoW. :DEdit: Apparently it's also silent! :) )

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  • 3 weeks later...

Yeah, that's a decent upgrade if that's your price range. If you've got a bit more cash to spare, then you can't go past a 4850 or 4870 (4870 X2 if you've got lots of spare cash)

I can appreciate if you've only got a little spare money; I myself just upgraded from a 7600GS to 8600GT this week. It was a bit frustrating, cos I was going from AGP to PCIe and had to get new (second-hand) mobo/cpu etc too. Hopefully Santa will be good to me this Christmas. :P

The 7600 was a decent card back in it's day, but yeah- definitely time for an upgrade ;)

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