good gaming cards ???

can anyone suggest a good graphics card for gaming ie half life 2 etc i don't want to pay over £150 if possible???

 

For under £150, you definately want to go for an ATI 9800Pro. Prices vary between manufacturer, but can be found between £110-£180 here in the uk.

I've played Counter-Strike:Source (which is counter-strike ported to the Half-Life2 Engine) with a 9600XT, i get 30-40fps @ 1024x768 32bit and thats on a multiplayer server with about 16 other people.

So the 9800Pro will play Half-Life 2 with nice graphics at a good frame rate.

The 9600XT is one model down from the 9800, however the 9600XT only has 4 pipelines, where as the 9800 has 8 Pipelines, which is alot better.

 

Well, without HL2 being out, no one, save Valve can really say how it's going to play. However, from what I've been reading, it's not going to require grunty cards to enjoy high resolution gaming like Far Cry and D00M 3.

I wouldn't get anything less than a Radeon 9600 series card (except for the 9600SE...not worth the money), but the Radeon 9800 cards should be within your reach. The XT is clocked faster than the Pro, but I'm not so sure it's worth the extra money spent.

 

I'll go further than BigB here and say that you shouldn't get anything below a 9800 Pro.

 

course if your made of money you could get a ATI Radeon X800 XT
which will also give the benefit of good future proofing.
It is REALLY expensive though so dont go getting yourself into debt or anything.

 

The nVidia 6200's will be available soon also.

 

thanks what the next up from a 9800pro ???

 

Th next model is te Radeon 9800XT. But for the price you'll be better off with a card like the GeForce 6600GT whihc can be found in AGP.

 

thanks addis ,do these perform better than a 9800 pro whats the price difference likely to be ??

 

According to dabs.com a Geforce 6600GT AGP will cost you £146.99.
You can find cheaper ones but they're mostly PCI-E versions which you need a PCI-E motherboard to use.

And yes they will perform much better than any 9x00 series cards because they're the current generation cards, while the 9x00 are last generation and our outdated in today's market.

 

Now that HL2 is out, from playing it myself, you do not need a terribly grunty card to run it well. Provided you're not chugging along in a Pentium II box or something otherwise slow, you'll be fine with something like a Radeon 9600Pro. If HL2 is the main thing to play for you, you really won't need to buy something like a GeForce 6600GT AGP. You can if you want, but it's definitely not necessary to get a highly playable experience at a decent resolution.

 

True but longevity is a factor with some people. While a radeon 9600pro may be perfect for HL2, it may not necessarily keep up when its got to handle the releases of 2005. Especially if they're coded as badly as Halo was.