Graphics Card

gman

gman

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Graham
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I'm a little out of touch with computers these days so would anyone be able to confirm if my graphics card is PCI-Express and which version (ie. 1, 2, 2.1 etc).

It's a Dell XPS420 and the current card is an 8800GTX 768MB. I'm feeling that despite being a great card it's a little dated now compared to the newer ones - the fan is going mental sometimes when under load! lol

Oh, any recommendations for an upgrade? Not looking to spend more than £150 and prefer Nvidia as I always found ATI ones crashed. They could be better now though? Also, will I be needing loads of extra internal power cables for it? I think the 8800GTX has just one separate power cable going into it.


Cheers
G
 
This: http://reviews.cnet.com/desktops/dell-xps-420/4507-3118_7-32716531.html suggests it's PCI Express 2.0 x 16 (which is what I'd expect).

As to other graphics cards - depends if you game or not. I don't and I'm perfectly happy with a mid-range passive GTS 450. Photoshop/lightroom only do the basic acceleration, so you don't need too much oomph for those.
 
That's very cheap, although there appear to be a few variations of these cards that determine their performance! (http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html)

I was also looking at the GTX460 SE which may be of similar performance (depending on which GTX560 you are looking at) but I've noticed these cards all use 256bit memory interface whereas my 8800GTX is 384bit. Will this make any difference?

I'm also a little concerned about creating a bottleneck where the graphics card is disproportionately fast compared to my system RAM etc.


EDIT: Just looked at the texture fill rate of the GTX460 SE and it's considerably less than the 8800GTX. I don't think the numbers are good enough to justify replacing the 8800GTX with it so I've gone for this one :)
 
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