Guild Wars 2

question for everyone…

i have a still-somewhat decent, if aging, rig i play on (2.4 G Phenom quad core), but the weak link has always been the vid card, an ATI Radeon HD 4300/4500 series. i am looking to upgrade, but i havn’t kept current with what’s good and what’s just expensive fluff. can anyone make any recomendations?

i play DDO and GW2, and am interested in trying EQNext when it comes out, i use a 28" HDTV as my monitor, and i have a TV tuner card and a blu ray player installed, and i have a budget of around $100, so anything that can accomodate all of that would make me happy

thanks guys!

Hmm. That motherboard does have an HD 4200 but the GPU suggests it’s either an HD 4350/4550, which is only a minor step up.

So you have plenty of power, a PCIe x16 slot and a $100 budget. Online you can get a 1GB AMD R7 250X, formerly the HD 7770, for $100.

nVidia doesn’t have anything that competes at that price point, the 1GB GTX 650 (not the 650Ti) is also in that price range but is much slower. The 1GB GTX 750 (not the 750Ti) is about $10-20 more but is much faster than the R7 250×.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-r7-250x-graphics-card-review,3747-3.html

http://pcpartpicker.com/parts/video-card/#c=115,163,161&sort=a8&r=1024

(note you may want to cut and paste the pcpartpicker URL because the forum redirector mangles it a bit)

First use a utility like GPU-Z to give us the exact Radeon model. Second I’m assuming the current card doesn’t use a PCIe power connector. Power may be an issue and limiting factor, more so that your budget. So what size, in watts is your power supply. If your PC is a manufactured rather than DIY what manufacturer and model, you should be able to get that from Control Panel → System.

Also are you sure it’s a card? A lot of older AMD motherboards use motherboard based graphics that read as an HD 4200. Since it sounds like you are using a 1st gen Phenom and not a Phenom II, I’m guessing the system is fairly old in computer years.

Just trying to get a better handle on what you have.

homebuilt rig, so i’m sure the vid card is a separate beastie. the parts were a Christmas present from my husband 4 years ago

MB: ASUS M4A785-M (AM2)
CPU: AMD Phenom X4 9750
4 G of RAM (i know... i know... i only bought the 32 bit win7, so even if i filled up that mobo with the 8 Gigs it could hold, i could only use half of it. blargh

and GPU-Z said the same thing speccy, system info, and dxdiag said. ATI Radeon HD 4300/4500 series. it does, however, include the exact GPU. RV710. also, if i’m reading this right, i do have a PCIe version of the card

my power supply is either 500 watts or 600 watts. i don’t remember for absolute certain, but i could crack the case and take a look if i need to

at $100 depnding on sales a r7 260x (rebadged 7790) is your best solution. if you want to spend a bit more you can find the 750ti’s or r7 265 (rebadged 7850) for about $120 or if you want to spend less r7 250x’s (rebadged 7770) can be found for as little as $60

All have similar price/performance ratios so pick based on your budget.

I would personally go with a 750 ti or R7 265, they might cost slightly more than 100$ but highly worth it in the long run.

Whatever card you’re going to buy make sure it doesn’t have 1 GB ram, they’re not worth the money.

lol i think life hates me... my husband upped my budget a little bit (yay) so i ended up ordering this. it arrived today, and i unpacked it and started to install it, to discover that the auxiliary power cable it came with doesn’t connect to anything i have. my power supply has 2 PCIe power ports free on it, but the cable that came with the card is 1. too short to reach them, and 2. doesn’t appear to be the right thing to plug in to those ports. it appears to be a 6 pin PCIe to single molex adapter (which seems odd to me, because when i started searching for a possible solution everything that was PCIe to molex had dual plugs at the molex end). downside, my whole rig is SATA, so i have no free molex ports to plug it into to see if that will work.

i had to leave it and go to work before i got a chance to really look at it good and see if i was missing anything obvious, so i’ll stop ranting now. XD if anyone has any ideas of painfully obvious things i might have missed, let me know. i’ll poke around again when i get home tonight, and possibly have a run out to the local computer parts guy in town tomorrow if i need some sort of adapter or extender or something.

thanks everyone

The card came with a 4 pin molex to 6 pin PCIe adapter cable. It’s for people who don’t have a PSU with one or more 6-pin PCIe power connectors. I should have guessed with a system with parts that “old” that your PSU may not have PCIe connectors.

Of course you may have a modular PSU and back when you built it you didn’t need PCIe 6-pins so you optionally left them unattached. I would be surprised that if your PSU does have PCIe 6-pin cables, that your case is so tall that they cable won’t reach.

unfortunately, that’s exactly what i seemed to have. the 2 PCIe ports on the power supply are on the very top of it, and yeah, i left those cables disconnected, as i had no use for them when i originally assembled my comp. i have NO idea where those cables are now... probably thrown away at this point... off to the computer store tomorrow i suppose. *sigh*

katz.8376:

unfortunately, that’s exactly what i seemed to have. the 2 PCIe ports on the power supply are on the very top of it, and yeah, i left those cables disconnected, as i had no use for them when i originally assembled my comp. i have NO idea where those cables are now… probably thrown away at this point… off to the computer store tomorrow i suppose. sigh

You can order replacement modular cables ;-)

Goto the manufacturer of your power supply, look at their accessories section. I’m willing to bet you can get a nice and long 6 or 8 pin GPU power cable for under 10bucks shipped. If not, look on Ebay :-)