Graphics cards?

[Alex0608]

Hey
I am building a pc that needs a graphics card attached to it, i need it to work, be ok, but as cheep as possible. and sadly i no very little about the makes and qualities of graphics cards. any one got any tips on what to look for? especialy what is good and what is bad in todays market?

Thanks alot
ALEX

 

[Nokkie]

well if you search the forum you'll find the latest discussions on graphics cards that has been discussed to give you a better overview

keywords search brand name or title graphics cards

 

[Silent_Bob]

it all depends on your budget and the motherboard you are looking at getting

 

[PearlJam]

What is your budget and what will the use of the pc be?

 

[bluesting]

Hi,

Well, you specified ... "as cheap as possible" ... if it's a new PC ... it's likely to have a PCI-Express slot on the motherboard ... if it's older (possibly second-hand) ... you might need an AGP card. If it's VERY old ... then you will need a PCI card (which are scarce these days)

So the first thing you need to know is, what type of graphics card you need. PCI-Express, AGP or PCI. These are NOT compatible! You cannot put an PCI card in a PCI-Express slot!

Cheapest ... do you need to play games, as in the new games on the market? Then cheapest is not going to be very useful, and you'll land up having to buy a new card soon! Because the cheap cards will not render 3D graphics fast enough. They will be very "jerky"! If the only thing you need the card for is things like Word and Excel, then by all means, you can probably get a card for R150-R250 new. If you need to play some games, I would start with a GeForce 6600GT card. It's a good all rounder. They're usually about R1000-R1300 with 128MB memory on the card. The memory on a card is essential. If you just need to do things like Word/Excel, then you only need 2MB-8MB ... depending on the resolution of your monitor. The memory on a card is used for 2 things.

1) Resolution and Refresh rate. eg. 1600x1200 resolution will need more memory than 1024x768

2) Textures in games. The more memory on the card, the more textures and higher texture quality in games you can have without slowing the action.


Check out my site to get an idea of costs:
AGP: http://www.bluesting.co.za/category.php?category=12
PCI-Express: http://www.bluesting.co.za/category.php?category=13


Questions from here?

 

[Nokkie]

Hi,

Well, you specified ... "as cheap as possible" ... if it's a new PC ... it's likely to have a PCI-Express slot on the motherboard ... if it's older (possibly second-hand) ... you might need an AGP card. If it's VERY old ... then you will need a PCI card (which are scarce these days)

So the first thing you need to know is, what type of graphics card you need. PCI-Express, AGP or PCI. These are NOT compatible! You cannot put an PCI card in a PCI-Express slot!

Cheapest ... do you need to play games, as in the new games on the market? Then cheapest is not going to be very useful, and you'll land up having to buy a new card soon! Because the cheap cards will not render 3D graphics fast enough. They will be very "jerky"! If the only thing you need the card for is things like Word and Excel, then by all means, you can probably get a card for R150-R250 new. If you need to play some games, I would start with a GeForce 6600GT card. It's a good all rounder. They're usually about R1000-R1300 with 128MB memory on the card. The memory on a card is essential. If you just need to do things like Word/Excel, then you only need 2MB-8MB ... depending on the resolution of your monitor. The memory on a card is used for 2 things.

1) Resolution and Refresh rate. eg. 1600x1200 resolution will need more memory than 1024x768

2) Textures in games. The more memory on the card, the more textures and higher texture quality in games you can have without slowing the action.


Check out my site to get an idea of costs:
AGP: http://www.bluesting.co.za/category.php?category=12
PCI-Express: http://www.bluesting.co.za/category.php?category=13


Questions from here?

how do you know the difference between a pci and pci express card on your motherboard and when you buy them

also what is the difference between the two?

 

[Ekhaatvensters]

Aspersie? You don't know this?

Well PCI is very old technology as far as graphics cards go, while PCI express is the latest thing, and is only for graphics.PCI is used these days for sound cards, expansion card and LAN etc. AGP came between the two and there are still quite a few AGP cards around.

The difference on your board, well there wil be 3-5 PCI slots, smaller white ones in a row, and only one bigger PCI Express slot above all the PCI ones.

BTW, Bluesting is a great site for finding good prices on line, I use it all the time. (and I dont work for them or anything.)
When are you guys going to move out of Beta mode and catalog all the online stores?

 

[bluesting]

Ekhaatvensters (ek haat dit ook!), thanks for the vote of confidence ... the beta testing phase is kind of like Googles, they put everything under Beta first (sometimes for over 1 year), so if they want to change something, nobody bitches and moans! This applies mainly to the merchant XML data feeds and merchant admin back-end for me. The Beta phase is likely to end in Feb '07, at the launch of bluesting v2. Currently a small subset of the new features are being used by http://www.pricefind.co.za I'm completely re-writing the engine, making it more like an API. Just finished data capturing most of the desktop and notebook Western Digital hard drives. http://www.bluesting.co.za/westerndigital/
http://www.pricefind.co.za/westerndigital/


Aspersie, I would check the motherboard manual, they tell you what the motherboard has on it! Somewhere in the specifications. If you don't have the manual, goto the manufacturer website and check the specs for the board! Google for the motherboard model. As a general guide, I can tell you, if you see about 4 to 5 white connectors sticking out of the board evenly spaced about 10cm long, they are the PCI card slots, usually there should be another brown one, that's an AGP slot. If it's white and a bit longer, then it's PCI-Express. You won't have an AGP AND PCI-Express ... that's impossible ... it's either AGP or PCI-Express (If it's VERY old motherboard, you won't have either!)

Night night guys!

 

[killadoob]

o yes by the way pci-express vga cards do not offer much better performance than agp

apart from sli

 

[bluesting]

I agree 100% with Killadoob! The main reason is that PCI-Express is like a full-duplex card, able to send/receive at full speed (which is 8x per channel, full duplex gives it 16x, but it's very deceptive). AGP can only send or receive at the 8x. The reason it is deceptive, is that one channel (can't remember if its sending data to the card or receiving) is used so little! It's kind of like a modem that can send/receive at 192kbps, and an adsl modem that receives at 192kbps and sends at 64kbps. The data the modem sends is so small, usually just a text request to the server to retrieve a file, which could be a 2MB file. So the request is small, but getting the data is big.


Alex0608, if you are on a real budget, you can use PriceFind to search all the cards under R500:

AGP: http://www.pricefind.co.za/items.php?q=agp&minprice=&maxprice=500
PCI-Express: http://www.pricefind.co.za/items.php?q=pci+express&minprice=&maxprice=500

 

[killadoob]

but buy pci express because they are cheaper and future proof

 

[Nokkie]

Aspersie? You don't know this?

Well PCI is very old technology as far as graphics cards go, while PCI express is the latest thing, and is only for graphics.PCI is used these days for sound cards, expansion card and LAN etc. AGP came between the two and there are still quite a few AGP cards around.

The difference on your board, well there wil be 3-5 PCI slots, smaller white ones in a row, and only one bigger PCI Express slot above all the PCI ones.

BTW, Bluesting is a great site for finding good prices on line, I use it all the time. (and I dont work for them or anything.)
When are you guys going to move out of Beta mode and catalog all the online stores?

sorry i thought there were like two pci to pci express cards out for graphics

maybe thats still because i'm stuck on my agp 8 card heh