Which Graphics Card - under £40

AWOL_2 · 16 January 2007 at 1:34PM

Can someone reccomend me a good graphics card.

I have an AGP x4 slot on my MB

I was thinking 256MB - DVI - and TV out would be good.
Also i want to be able to use dual monitor set up.

Budget £40

Want to use it now and for it to work well with Vista as i am sure that i will be upgrading to vista at some point in the future.

Gib_Gib · 16 January 2007 at 1:40PM

AWOL wrote:

and for it to work well with Vista

No graphics card under £40 will run Vista well, by this I mean will run all the aero effects in vista. But just about any gfx card will run vista, just without all the fancy effects going on.

Under £40 you are stuck with

ati 9550, 9250 or a geforce 6200.

All are pretty much the same.

AWOL_2 · 16 January 2007 at 2:31PM

Gib_Gib wrote:

No graphics card under £40 will run Vista well, by this I mean will run all the aero effects in vista. But just about any gfx card will run vista, just without all the fancy effects going on.

Under £40 you are stuck with

ati 9550, 9250 or a geforce 6200.

All are pretty much the same.

In which case - which is the cheapest for a 256MB.

Zagu · 16 January 2007 at 2:58PM

Personally Id go for this, if you can get a few quid more.

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=150992

Its a nice budget card, much better than the normal 6600. And dont get too hung up on the amount of memory, 256 is generally only slightly faster than 128. You are much better spending the money on the fundimental specs of the card rather than the amount of memory.

Blacksheep1979 · 16 January 2007 at 3:08PM

why are people constantly obsessed by numbers - just because it has 256mb of memory doesn't mean that its going to work any better. Run a £40 128mb card and the same model 256mb card through a benchmarking program and you will see next to no difference.

To display a 1280x1024 screen (average 19" lcd monitor)

you need

32 bits per pixel x 1024 x 1280 = 5242880 bytes = 5mb

actually you'll need twice that due to buffering

quite a bit different from the 256mb you think you need - the rest of the memory is used if you are using complex shaders, textures etc. The more important part is the core gpu which does all the hard work.

Aliktren · 16 January 2007 at 3:47PM

also if thats your budget I'd look at some older, higher end AGP card secondhand ?? maybe ebay or something.

Also concur that memory makes little/no difference at the moment, its the speed of the GPU generally thats makes the difference

Blacksheep1979 · 16 January 2007 at 8:30PM

with a 4x agp slot you're going to be v limited - you aren't going to be getting high end graphics even if you did get a £200 agp card.

GoofyGAT · 16 January 2007 at 11:03PM

Aliktren wrote:

also if thats your budget I'd look at some older, higher end AGP card secondhand ?? maybe ebay or something.

Good advice there - will possibly save AWOL a few bob.

AWOL, consider this secondhand 9800 Pro for around £40 delivered (or the AIW one at the bottom for a little more).

I have a Radeon 9700 & on running a Vista-ready test get this:

AWOL wrote:

Want to use it now and for it to work well with Vista as i am sure that i will be upgrading to vista at some point in the future.

The Radeon 9800 Pro is a better card (than the 9700) & with all the necessary ingredients for Vista, though Vista does need the PC components to be up to scratch as well for optimum performance & Windows Aero.

Official list of GPUs that will support Vista: ATI / nVidia

I don't think 4/8x is going to make much difference in running Vista.

Zagu wrote:

Personally Id go for this, if you can get a few quid more.
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=150992

I like the looks of that too, expecially for the price

. G

wombler · 17 January 2007 at 2:01AM

There's a lot of misconceptions about graphics cards. You really don't need an expensive graphics card UNLESS you intend to play advanced 3d games, otherwise £40 is more than enough to spend. You don't need to even spend that just to run the basic version of Vista but if you want to have the new "Aero" look to Vista (rotating windows, translucent borders etc) you will need the following, according to Microsoft:

Support for DirectX 9 graphics with a WDDM driver, 128 MB of graphics
memory (minimum), Pixel Shader 2.0 and 32 bits per pixel. Link

I just bought a new graphics card that is Vista Aero ready (according to both NVidia and Microsoft), with DVI / TV out / Dual Monitor support and it cost me about £25 from ebuyer (where there were also several positive reviewers directly stating that they have run Beta versions of Aero using it). Both the major graphics card chip manufacturers have also published lists of which of their cards support Aero: NVidia ATI

Something with the ATI 9550 chip or the NVidia 6200 should run Vista Aero absolutely fine according to both Microsoft specs and the NVidia / ATI ones, for example:
http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/63693/rb/24519789718 - Connect3d ATI Radeon 9550 £35 inc vat
http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/104734/rb/24519808323 - NVidia Geforce 6200 £24.93 inc vat

I have the second one of those and I'm very pleased with it indeed. Hope that helps.

EDIT: Just ran the Vista Advisor and my 6200 should run Vista Aero according to that.

epz_2 · 17 January 2007 at 3:27AM

for areo you will need a shader model 3 card, basicly a nvidia 6*** series or greater or an ati x1***.

are you sure its worth upgrading, very few sub 40 pound cards offer anything close to what would be called good 3d performance, these days a 6600gt is about the minimum most would consider worth upgrading to.

if its just the dvi and tv port you may want to look at stuff like nvidias 4600ti's they have vivo better performance than the cheap cards and go for buttons on ebay

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Gainward-750-8X-XP-GeForce-4-Ultra-128MB_W0QQitemZ150079988324QQihZ005QQcategoryZ27387QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

GoofyGAT · 17 January 2007 at 12:08PM

epz wrote:

for areo you will need a shader model 3 card, basicly a nvidia 6*** series or greater or an ati x1***....[/url]

Where did you get that from may I ask?

In this MS article: How do I get Windows Aero? (& a link in my first post) the minimum requirements mentioned are:

* 1-GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
* 1 gigabyte (GB) of random access memory (RAM)
* 128-MB graphics card [for AWOL: also mentions lower down that 256Mb of graphics memory is required for very large screens only]
* DirectX 9 class graphics processor that supports a Windows Display Driver Model Driver, Pixel Shader 2.0 in hardware, and 32 bits per pixel

AWOL, note that Vista Home Basic doesn't have the Aero feature - only the following Vista editions include it: Business, Enterprise, Home Premium & Ultimate (from my link in this post). And we're going on about Aero - we don't even know if you actually want it

, Edit: well, just found that you do! G

Which Graphics Card - under £40

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