Recommendations for a good video card without breaking the bank

[Baby Lee]

Well, after 7 years, I'm upgrading. My AiW 8500 on AGP, erasing my last excuse for not.

Already got a Q6600 QuadCore, 2Gb of OCZ platinum DDR2-800, and a new Asus Lifestyle P35 P5K MOBO.

Now I need a recommend for a good mix of performance and value in a video card. I'd like to get something with a little DDR3 memory, as opposed to tons of DDR2. I'm leaning towards a HD 3650 line, but am not married to any particular path.

So what are people's experiences? what's imperative to get? What's overkill?

I'm not a gamer. I'm not looking to play Crysis at ultrarealistic settings. My monitor is a 19" widescreen, with 1440x900 max resolution, DVI input, and 5ms response. My primary interest is good HDTV output. I also dabble in Photoshop, CAD and math modeling [Maple, Matlab].

['Hamas' Jenkins]

I would look at the ATI's.

If you are looking for good HD output, the 2600 line and above have a DVI-HDMI adapter in box, and the cards have a 5.1 decoder on board that is pretty solid.

I picked up a 2600 XT from New Egg a while back and use it to drive a 17" LCD and a 32" Olevia in a spare bedroom for more media purposes.

Hell, for 180 bucks you can get a card with 512 MB of DDR4 RAM

Try this guy:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102719

[Baby Lee]

I would look at the ATI's.

If you are looking for good HD output, the 2600 line and above have a DVI-HDMI adapter in box, and the cards have a 5.1 decoder on board that is pretty solid.

I picked up a 2600 XT from New Egg a while back and use it to drive a 17" LCD and a 32" Olevia in a spare bedroom for more media purposes.

Hell, for 180 bucks you can get a card with 512 MB of DDR4 RAM

Try this guy:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102719
The thing is, I'm a little skimpy on PS power. Settled for a 450 watter they had on special. It has PCI-e prongs, but ATI/AMD's site recommends a MINIMUM of 450W, and 750W if I go crossfire, for the 3870s.

[htismaqe]

Honestly, the total wattage of the PSU is not real relevant. The 12V rail is what's primarily important. I've seen 450W PSU's with double the 12V wattage of 600W PSU's, because the manufacturer is inflating the 5V rail to make the PSU seem more powerful than it is.

Do you have a split 12V rail? If not, what is the wattage of the 12V rail? If so, are the rails delineated by wattage (unless you have a very expensive PSU, chances are they're not)?

Let us know how much wattage you have on the 12V rail and we'll find a card for you.

[Baby Lee]

Honestly, the total wattage of the PSU is not real relevant. The 12V rail is what's primarily important. I've seen 450W PSU's with double the 12V wattage of 600W PSU's, because the manufacturer is inflating the 5V rail to make the PSU seem more powerful than it is.

Do you have a split 12V rail? If not, what is the wattage of the 12V rail? If so, are the rails delineated by wattage (unless you have a very expensive PSU, chances are they're not)?

Let us know how much wattage you have on the 12V rail and we'll find a card for you.

I don't know. I told my parents [oh, they're picking it up for me because Microcenter in Lenexa had instore only deals], I wanted something that was PCI-e compliant and a good match with the MOBO/Proc and they bought what the tech recommended. It's probably not outstanding, as it was $40 after like $30 off special, but they guy said it'd be sufficient for the MOBO/Proc and PCI-e. I hadn't addressed power consumption of the video card at the time.

Like I said, my main point of inquiry is what is imperative [like go for less DDR3/DDR4, over more DDR2, or the AV processing of an ATI/AMD HD line] and what is overkill. I want smooth 264 playback, but don't need 12 million rendered pixel textures or some shit.

[Baby Lee]

If you are looking for good HD output, the 2600 line and above have a DVI-HDMI adapter in box, and the cards have a 5.1 decoder on board that is pretty solid.
Case in point, is the HW decoding on HD cards audio only, or video as well, as both my monitor and my RPTV are DVI, and my soundcard is optical out, so I'm not really in need of something that's main plus is that it can decode just for HDMI output.
I'm assuming there's HW video decoding, that puts me leaning toward the HD line.

['Hamas' Jenkins]

htis is right about the 12V rail. If you look up the specs you can see how many rails and what supported current each rail has.

Any one of those cards will give you smooth 264 playback. I have an E6750 w/ 4 gigs of RAM and a 2600XT and it obliterates 264.

I can play .mkv files encoded in 720p (5.1) on a P4 3.0 with 2 gigs of RAM and a 9600 pro.

[Abba-Dabba]

Since a recommendation for a ATI has already been put out there. I'll throw in a NVidia choice.

9600gt. Newest card out, reasonably priced around $150.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3618454&CatId=1826

[Baby Lee]

I'm leaning;

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127333

Anyone heard bad? good?

[htismaqe]

Looks good to me. I'm pretty pro-MSI after my latest experience...

[JBucc]

9600GT's are very good. Cheap and just a notch below the 8800GT's in performance.

[kaplin42]

Well, after 7 years, I'm upgrading. My AiW 8500 on AGP, erasing my last excuse for not.

Already got a Q6600 QuadCore, 2Gb of OCZ platinum DDR2-800, and a new Asus Lifestyle P35 P5K MOBO.

Now I need a recommend for a good mix of performance and value in a video card. I'd like to get something with a little DDR3 memory, as opposed to tons of DDR2. I'm leaning towards a HD 3650 line, but am not married to any particular path.

So what are people's experiences? what's imperative to get? What's overkill?

I'm not a gamer. I'm not looking to play Crysis at ultrarealistic settings. My monitor is a 19" widescreen, with 1440x900 max resolution, DVI input, and 5ms response. My primary interest is good HDTV output. I also dabble in Photoshop, CAD and math modeling [Maple, Matlab].


If you don't mind doing a little reading, this is a really good article.

Tom's Hardware: Best Video Card for the Money March, 2008 (http://www.tomshardware.com/2008/03/05/the_best_gaming_graphics/)

Every month they do this. Really good analysis of the top cards for the High, Medium and Low price ranges.

[Baby Lee]

http://www.newegg.com/product/product.aspx?Item=N82E16814134040&CMP=AFC-C8Junction

Anyone know about Elitegroup. Intrigued by the passive cooler

And in the interest of not looking like a relic, it was actually my AIW 9800 that died. I sold my 8500 long ago.

[Baby Lee]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150277

Here's what I went with. Finally got it all together. First MOBO was DOA, and since I bought it at Microcenter in OP KS, I had to drive over there and exchange it.

And I gotta say, for those of you who like the looks and features of Vista, but prefer XP, Johnny's Ultimate XP is BALLS. It's XP with a complete Vista feature set. Sidebar, transparencies, that 3D application shuffler thing. It also can be set up to look and act exactly like Leopard or or Linux.
And for those concerned with piracy, it does a provide Student key, but you can enter your own licensed key to salve your conscience [which I did].

[TrickyNicky]

XFX is a good manufacturer. Had a card literally burn out on me and they sent me a replacement within a week and refunded the shipping costs to send the burnt up one back.