Before I say anything I would just like to state that I know nothing about this kind of stuff, so if I say something a wrong way or say something that doesn't make sense, sorry. I was wondering if someone could recommend a decent graphics card for gaming. I downloaded The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion today and the speed that I have to run it at for it to not be slow, makes the graphics horrible and not even enjoyable. I have bought games in the past that have turned out to need higher specs then my computer had, so I was going to attempt to fix this problem. I'm not even sure if it's a graphics card that I need, it might be something different. When I play high end games, the game play is choppy and unplayable at times. At the moment this is what it says in properties.
GT5220
AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual
Core Processor 3800+
2.01 GHz 896 MB of RAM
Card is NVIDIA GeForce 6150 LE. Downloaded latest update today (hopefully it worked). What would be a good video/graphics card for running games such as Fallout 3, Team Fortress 2, Farcry 2 or Oblivion that isn't too expensive? If you have any questions let me know. Thanks.
To be completely honest, your CPU could use a little bit of an upgrade and you might want to install another 1gig stick of a RAM. You could go without the CPU upgrade for awhile, but I recommend getting the RAM upgrade.
The best GPU for the money is by far the ATI Radeon HD 4870. Usually is about $150 for the 512MB model, but that price should drop with the 5800 and 5900 series models that just came back and also the Holiday season coming up.
Oh, I almost forgot. You will need a PCI-E 2.0 X16 port that is open on your motherboard and a 500W Power Supply with 2x6 Pin PCI-E Connectors.
For buying the Video Card I would recommend:
http://www.newegg.com/Amazing Prices, I buy
everything there.
For Video Card Benchmarks:
http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/They Provide a good amount of Video Cards and how they rank against each other performance wise.
For information on if you can run a game, refer to this site:
http://cyri.systemrequirementslab.com/srtest/They have hundreds of games listed and you can test to see if your computer will run it.
Edited by AlecVincent, 21 November 2009 - 02:57 PM.