Looking for solid upgrade...

[Criptyk]

Hello, I am wanting to update my graphics card and I'm just curious what some good recommendations would be.

My setup is nothing special, AMD Phenom Quad Core 9100e, 4 MB DDR 2 ram 800 Mhz, and current video card ATI 4650HD (XFX).

I am not looking for top of the line here just something to bump up the performance a little to the tone of $100-$150. Maybe updating ram would be a better choice.

I'm open to suggestions.

I'm not really willing to update a whole lot here because its an AM2 socket and i can only go so far with AM2.

I plan on doing a custom build here within a year or so. Again, just looking for a little bump up in performance.

[Deleted]

HD 5770 or GTS 450 fit the budget and are about equally fast.

E: GTX 460 goes really cheap too, see if you can find cheap one as it's a notch better.

[Criptyk]

What would you reccomend. I know AMD and ATI work well together but I'm sick of Catalyst to be honest.

I have had NVidia in the past and things just seemed to go much more smoothly.

[Deleted]

The current Catalysts have been quite poor indeed. Might try Nvidia for a change myself.

[Criptyk]

I know the GTS 450 requires a 6 pin power supply but i cant tell if the 5770 does, any idea?

[Deleted]

HD 5770 has 6pin too. There should be a molex to 6pin adapter included with the card.

[Menolól]

The current Catalysts have been quite poor indeed. Might try Nvidia for a change myself.

i've heard that a lot but imo i think its a myth, yes catalyst's versions in the past have been rather poor but as of late, okey. The new 11.1 from yesterday provided a vast amount of bug fixes aswell as a new interface for catalyst which looks really good if i may say so.

Yes the 5770 comes with a molex to 6 pin adapter.

[vesseblah]

If you're talking about performance in 25-man raids, new graphics card will do remarkably little. You have very low end processor, the slowest and cheapest quad core Phenom AMD ever made. Depending on your motherboard it might be possible to upgrade it quite a lot further than you think, or it might be dead end.

If you're planning on building new in a year, you should just ditch the whole computer now and build new, or skip the upgrades since anything you put in the current box can be considered life support at this stage. Also, there's nothing you can do to RAM to make this setup run faster.

[Cilraaz]

I know AMD and ATI work well together but I'm sick of Catalyst to be honest.

1. It's AMD (CPU) and AMD (GPU) now. ATi doesn't exist anymore.
2. AMD CPUs work just as well with nVidia cards. There's no magical connection between CPU and GPU brands.
3. Catalyst drivers are fine. Most of the hate toward them is still from years ago when their drivers were garbage. After AMD bought them, their driver quality increased greatly.