and I need to find a replacement. Thing is my comp is about 5 years old and I don't have the cash to upgrade. I have a NVIDIA GeForce 6800XT card. My MB has 1G of memory. Working on upgrading that to 2 or 4 as soon as I get it to accept the extra sticks without crashing. It doesn't like 4 512 sticks. System: XP Intel Pentium 4 CPU 3.00GHz 3.01 GHz, 1.00 GB of Ram Any advice I can get would be appreciated. I do lots of photo editing as semi-pro photographer, and some gaming but nothing extreme.
you could probably pick up second hand parts that gmers are getting rid of on ebay, that will still be a major improvement for your system since its so old. a geforce 9xxx GT would go for pretty cheap i imagine, your main priority should be ram though 2gb is a minimum, but 4gb will give you a lot of room for manoevre. and for photo editing ram and cpu is more important than the graphics card, because the processing is done by the cpu and not gpu. well most of it anyway
I saw a couple on ebay but I hate to get a used one since I am already having issues. Rather just get a new one even if it isn't an upgrade but comparable. Until I can figure out why my board won't accept the other gb I bought which is identical to what is already on board I can't get above 1gb. Once that is solved hopefully I will be able to max it out at 4gb. Since I do game occasionally I would like a card that can again handle at leat as much as the current one does. My problem is I don't know what to choose that will be compatible with my system.
I've bought my last two or three graphics cards used, and think almost all of them were ex parts from hardcore gamers who needed the newsest stuff, The best bargains I've had were. Q9400 £95 when RRP was around £180 HD4870 £120 when RRP was around £150 I've nevered ended up with a dude. My Tagan 530W modular PSU was bought in 2008 for £30. And back then modular PSUs were quite new and minimum was £99 asking price. There are bargains to be had out there, and I haven't had any issues with broken down parts, people are too averse to bad feedback to sell questionabale quality gear.
