What's the best video card to upgrade to?

Xegreny - Blaster|Level 50|Energy Blast Energy Manipulation Force Mastery|Vigilante
Taxibot REBIRTH - Defender|Level 50|Empathy & Sonic Blast & Psychic Mastery|Hero
Acton Blake - Dominator|Level 15|Electric Control & Electric Assault|Praetorian-Loyalist

Any card that can run CoX in UM will have zero problem with TF2 (it's quite reasonable on the graphics) and should be quite good with Aion (ugh, grind fest extreme!).

Edit: Wait a second, I'm pretty sure Inspirons are only laptops... if your machine is a laptop, it's EXTREMELY unlikely you could change/upgrade your graphics.

Edit 2: So there's Inspiron desktops now? Ugh... I had enough of Inspirons with the pile of crap known only as the 5150...

We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.

Originally Posted by ShadowNate ;_; ?!?! What the heck is wrong with you, my god, I have never been so confused in my life!

The best card that you can buy...

would be the RadeonHD 5970 4gb. But since I seriously doubt you have $1000 hanging around to drop on a graphics card... and it needs Crossfire support to really shine...

If you have $500 to spend on a graphics card, the Nvidia GTX 480 is the most powerful single chip card around... but it puts off near as makes no difference 200 degrees Fahrenheit of heat, and I seriously doubt a Dell 560 comes with a 700 watt+ power-supply.

If you've got $400 to spend on a graphics card, AMD's RadeonHD 5870 is just about as fast as the GTX 480, uses a lot less power, and doesn't pull double duty as an oven.

If you've got $300 to spend on a graphics card, AMD's RadeonHD 5850 is your target.

If you've got $200-$250, RadeonHD 5830

or alternatively, the RadeonHD 4890. Doesn't do DX11 / OpenGL 4.0, but frames per second per resolution, it's the best deal going.

Around the $150-$170 mark you'll find RadeonHD 5770's:

RadeonHD 5750's can be hard for around $130.

You can also find RadeonHD 4870's in this price bracket, but really, if you're going to spend $130 or more, you should really get a card with DirectX 11 / OpenGL 4.0 support.

Then around the $100 mark you'll find the RadeonHD 4850, which is the starting point for Ultra Mode support on AMD/ATi.


And yes, there's a reason I didn't list any other cards from Nvidia than the GTX 480. If you are spending for Ultimate Power with no consideration as to budget, it's hard to pass up. My personal opinion is that you'd be wasting money on a couple accounts:

• First being that while it is more powerful than a RadeonHD 5870, it's not $100 more powerful, it's closer to $5 or $10 more powerful... and if you buy a good 5870 you can overclock that difference away
• Second, you really need a specially designed chassis with good air movement to deal with the sheer amount of heat a GTX 480 puts off. Put this in a normal chassis where the fans have to run at maximum, and you might understand why the card is knicked named Geforce FX 2.0

Outside of the GTX 480, every other card is massively overpriced for performance. While the GTX 470 has dropped down to around $330 if you shop carefully, there's the severe problem that many lower-end board vendors have cut quality corners on the boards to get prices down. Boards known to have a good quality, such as Evga's 1475 model, still rack up near $390. Even the base models are still $40 over a cheap RadeonHD 5850... while being no faster... and also having the same critical problem as the GTX 480. You'll need one hell of a power supply, and the GTX 470 will also approach 200 degrees F under full load.

From there on down... well, you can find Nvidia GTX 260 cards around the $180 mark. Slight problem: they'll be outpaced in real games by the RadeonHD 5750 which is near $50 less... and the Nvidia GTX 2xx line-up lacks DX11 / OpenGL support...

The real big thorn is the RadeonHD 4890. It's a DX10 / OpenGL 3.3 graphics card that you can get around $200. So, on features, it's like the Nvidia GTX 2xx series. On performance... you'd be spending nearly double the RadeonHD 4890's price point to get something competitive from Nvidia's DX 10 / OpenGL 3.2 lineup... the GTX 285.


So, those are your options... pick your price point, and pick your vendor.

Oh: if you are dead set on buying a card with an Nvidia brand name: buy a card from XFX, Evga, or if you can still find them, BFG.

If you buy a card with an AMD/ATi brand name... do NOT buy anything from Diamond Multimedia.

No, it's a desktop. I didn't actually check the machine, but Inspiron sounded right..

And don't tell me that Aion's a grindfest.. I just dropped forty bucks on it because it looked cool.. heh. But yeah, CoX usually causes the chipset to overheat in 10 to 20 minutes while TF2 only crashes it after hours of play.

First of all, wow thank you for all the information! Unfortunately, all those nice cards you mentioned I can't afford. heh. I'm thinking of grabbing that one, since it's not my entire budget. Do you think it's worth it to spend another 20 dollars to get the 5770?

Xegreny - Blaster|Level 50|Energy Blast Energy Manipulation Force Mastery|Vigilante
Taxibot REBIRTH - Defender|Level 50|Empathy & Sonic Blast & Psychic Mastery|Hero
Acton Blake - Dominator|Level 15|Electric Control & Electric Assault|Praetorian-Loyalist