Please recommend a graphics card

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GaryK26

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Gary
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Should be taking delivery of a new (well reconditioned) Dell PC tomorrow and all being well with it I shall also be ordering a Dell 2209WA monitor to go with it.

Thing is, I think that the PC will have integrated graphics, or at very best a very low end card (as expected).

Please could you recommend a graphics card with the following in mind....

- Budget, I'd like to keep to under £100
- main usage would be CS3 / LR3
- something capable of playing games like Modern Warfare 2
- I'm not a serious gamer, so no need for something that will deliver 1,000,000 fps on MW2 :lol:

Basically I'm after something that will give me decent performance on a budget.

Cheers
Gary
 
ATI 4770

* GDDR5 memory
* 24x custom filter anti-aliasing (CFAA) and high performance anisotropic filtering
* Dual mode ATI CrossFireX multi-GPU support for highly scalable performance
* PCI Express 2.0 support
* Dynamic Geometry Acceleration
* Game physics processing capability
* ATI AvivoHD video and display technology:
* Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD 2) for Blu-ray and HD Video
* Accelerated Video Transcoding (AVT)
* DVD Upscaling
* Dynamic Contrast
* Built-in HDMI with 7.1 surround sound support
* Dynamic power management with ATI PowerPlay technology
* ATI Stream technology

or the ATI 4890, (I know it's over budget but it is a very good card, I run two in crossfire mode)

- ATI Radeon HD 4890 GPU @ 850MHz
- 1024MB GDDR5 Memory @ 3900MHz
- 24x custom filter anti-aliasing (CFAA) and high performance anisotropic filtering
- PCI Express 2.0 support
- ATI CrossFireX Multi-GPU Technology
- Microsoft DirectX 10.1 support
- Shader Model 4.1
- ATI Avivo HD video and display technology
- Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD) for Blu-ray and HD Video
- Built-in HDMI with 5.1 surround sound support
- On-chip HDCP
- 1yr Warranty
 
Wait and see how the existing card performs before spending your cash. When and if the time comes I'd go for an Nvidia card, perhaps an older model high end one like a 9800~ Nvidia driver support is vastly superior to ATIs.
 
One thing to keep in mind is that unless you're doing a lot of real-time 3D calculations, or shader work - a super spiffy graphics card won't be that much help to improve performance.

In terms of photo-editing you'll probably gain more in terms of performance by maxing out the amount of RAM, and perhaps 4 cores as most graphics applications these days do a lot of their work threaded on different cores.

Of course, since you mention MW2 I'm guessing you'll want to some gaming too; and when it comes to PC gaming - you need to max you that graphics card! :)
 
OK, so the PC arrived this morning and as expected it doesn't have a dedicated graphics card.
Also, the PSU is 300W, so that will need to be taken into consideration as well.
Any suggestions for a half decent card that wouldn't need a PSU upgrade?
 
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