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purple_rain
05-22-2009, 04:36 AM
Hello everyone,
I need help on upgrading my graphic card. I'm not very good with computers so I appreciate all of the help I can get.

My specs are:
Asus M3A motherboard
AMD Phenom 9650 Quad-Core Processor 2.30 Ghz
4GB ram
Nvidia Geforce 8400 GS
500GB Hardrive
I think my power supply is 450.

What would be the best graphic card for me to upgrade to? Is the Nvidia 8600 GT good? I always hear about that card. Also I have some questions about playing PC games. In a PC game it allows me to adjust the resolution, is the game resolution suppose to be the same as the regular screen resolution?

Thanks in advance
Variable
05-22-2009, 08:22 PM
I would look at an ATI 4870 for price/performance and the power consumption is compareable to what you have at load.

As for your resolution, do you have a CRT or LCD? LCD's have native resolution.
purple_rain
05-23-2009, 06:47 AM
Thanks for the reply,
I have an Acer x193w 19inches LCD and the native resolution is 1440x900. One of my friends plays Crysis and he has the same LCD as me. He said something about getting more frames by using a lower resolution in the game even though his native resolution is 1440x900. Also some games I have played do not have the resolution option of 1440x900 but only the max of 1280x1024. What is that all about? Thanks again for the help
jlreich
05-23-2009, 10:06 AM
Running at the native resolution is best, but if you are getting low FPS then it is not a problem to lower the resolution in the game in order to bump up the FPS.

Also some games I have played do not have the resolution option of 1440x900 but only the max of 1280x1024. What is that all about?
Either the game doesn't support widescreen resolutions (some older games) or there are a couple of games, like Half Life 2 (most Valve games now that I think about it), that have a separate box in the advanced display settings to choose the aspect ratio and will only display the resolutions for the chosen aspect ratio. Once you choose 16:9 or 16:10 those resolutions become available.
cmeyvin
05-31-2009, 08:06 PM
What about him getting an HD4670 considering price/performance, it should give a decent performance at 1280X1024 and 1400X900.