Hi guys, looking for a little help please..

I was running Evga 8800 GTS R (SLI) . One card pooped the bed a couple months ago ,  and the second ,  just the other day.

So I need a new card. (not going SLI again).

My budget is around $ 400  ( might be able to squeeze more if I have too) .

I built this system around '07.   It's a bit outdated  , but I get by with it.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    QX9650 Quad core

 PSU : 750W silencer quad bk

 MEM : 4g Corsair Dominator DDR2

 OS : Vista Ultimate (64 bit )

 MB :  Evga 780i

 Also ,  I probably need to update my memory . So any tips for that would be greatly appreciated .  Budget on that would be as cheap as possible :) .

If I.m missing any info please let me know .

Thanks to all and any responses in advance.

Hope everyones New Year is a good one

Well the CPU is still decent enough. To upgrade your memory (I wouldn't buy more DDR2 unless I absolutely had to, and I don't think you absolutely have to with 4G) you'd need to upgrade your motherboard and CPU as well - and once you do all 3 of those, your entire $400 budget is pretty well shot and you haven't gotten a video card yet.

Right now, $400 the best bang for the buck is probably a AMD 7970, which stock is marginally slower than an nVidia 680 ($460), but when overclocked is marginally faster (and most overclock well, and factory overclocks called Gigahertz edition are faster out of the box, but cost a bit past your $400 budget).

The alternative to that is only spending about half of that budget now, and saving the other half for when you do upgrade the rest of your computer, or putting it into a nice SSD drive.

An AMD 7870 will run fairly well at 1080 - so much so that the graphical difference between it and a 7970 or 680 at 1080 is not much, because all the cards are plenty fast enough to run at that resolution with your CPU and the rest of your setup.

A 7870 runs about $240, leaving you $160 for a nice 120G SSD, or saving it for your other big computer upgrade later on. An SSD now will make your computer feel like a brand new super-fast system (although it won't give you any FPS upgrades).

I would have to agree with the suggestion of getting a 7870 and adding an SSD with your budget instead of all of it on a GPU only.

The addition of both would be a nice upgrade to your system.

I personally would shop around and see if you can get 4g of DDR2 for cheap. Ebay may be a good place to look even.

Thanks for the info..

For now , I think I'll go with the cheaper card . I'm looking into the EVGA 660 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130809

 In the past , I' ve used Newegg , Tiger , ZipZoom..  Are these guys still a good place to shop ?

I'll have to go research SSD's ...( I have no clue what it is ).

I ' m a bit  out-dated  when it comes to new hardware .

Right now I'm running  2X , 500 GB ,Seagate barracuda HDD ..

Almost full drives,

I'm a bit nervous if  I' m going to  have to transfer  everything to a new piece of hardware,

But I'll go Edumacate myself  on it .

Thanks again

Originally posted by madnos

Thanks for the info..

For now , I think I'll go with the cheaper card . I'm looking into the EVGA 660 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130809

 In the past , I' ve used Newegg , Tiger , ZipZoom..  Are these guys still a good place to shop ?

 

I'll have to go research SSD's ...( I have no clue what it is ).

I ' m a bit  out-dated  when it comes to new hardware .

Right now I'm running  2X , 500 GB ,Seagate barracuda HDD ..

Almost full drives,

I'm a bit nervous if  I' m going to  have to transfer  everything to a new piece of hardware,

But I'll go Edumacate myself  on it .

Thanks again

That's not a GeForce GTX 660.  That's a GeForce GTX 660 Ti, which is a totally different card.  And it's way overpriced.  This is a GeForce GTX 660:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814500270

Thanks for clarification.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814500270

I'll go take a look at it .

Again thanks for your time :D

SSD would improve your performance/loading times drastically. Even if it's only a 60/64gb one you can put some games in addition to the OS on there. Swap can be put on your old HD.

That processor is still pretty good so a 7850/7870 would work fine.

Mabye go with 7850+Small SSD

An OS upgrade is reccomended. Going from Vista to Win8 would be a huge improvment.

Other thoughts are reducing background processes. Trim your Ram timings as tight as possible. Defragment

Depending on the 7850 some of them come with voltage control but thoes are ususlly a bit spendier but the unlocked voltage 7850's are as fast as a 7870. Many 7850's will hit 1100 on stock voltage with the better cooling solutions some come with.