What Graphics Card to Buy

Hoping I can get some help on this from more knowledgeable types. I was never able to get around to buying a new video card last year when I made this thread (provided for system specs, etc). It was suggested that I pick up a new graphics card rather than more memory for my system, and Father Xmas suggested a GeForce GTX 460.

I found something comparable to that here, but then I found a GTX 550 for mega sale on Newegg right now. The 550 seems to have a similar setup and be just a little more powerful, not to mention cheaper. Am I reading that correctly, or am I way off? I'm also wanting to make sure my power system can handle it (I can find it for the 550 but not the 460 to make sure they compare there). Is there a big difference between the two? None of the numbers I can find in Newegg's stuff seems to reference that, unless I don't know what to look for there.

Any help would be much, much appreciated!

Tom's Hardware has a Graphic's Card Hierarchy Chart. It was just updated for November 2012.

The 460-256bit is one step up from the GTX550. The 460 seems to require a 450W PSU.

Triumph: White Succubus: 50 Ill/Emp/PF Snow Globe: 50 Ice/FF/Ice Strobe: 50 PB Shi Otomi: 50 Ninja/Ninjistu/GW Stalker My other characters

Oddly enough the model 460 is superior to the 550. IF you still have the C2D processor and DDR2 memory I too would go no higher than 460 Nvidia and expect medium settings in most 'current' games w/ a 19" monitor at most.
Even if you had a GTX 680 or higher your current hardwares would bottleneck the cards ability to perform at its full rate.

Ah, no. The GTX 550 Ti is noticeably less powerful than the older GTX 460. Good news is at that price (it is a refurbished card) it's finally priced to be attractive when compared to the AMD HD 7770 which is a tad faster than the 550Ti.

During nVidia's 500 series era they never came out with a card that had similar performance to the GTX 460 1GB. They did eventually came out the the GTX 560 (sans Ti) which would be equivalent to a extremely overclocked GTX 460 but they charged a lot more for it while the 550Ti was initially priced just a little less but was considerably less powerful, they later cut the price. However if you have the money I would go with the GTX 650Ti.

Here is a review of the GTX 650Ti which the comparison charts include the GTX 550Ti (the blue bar is a stock clocked GTX 650Ti as are the comparison cards). The GTX 460 1GB is no longer included in their comparison charts but at the time it and the AMD HD 6850 were nearly identical in overall performance.

Power wise the GTX 460 is rated at 160 watts max, the GTX 550Ti at 116 watts and the GTX 650Ti at 110 watts. None of these cards will pose a problem with your current PSU, assuming you didn't replace the Earthwatts 500.

And honestly PCIe 3.0 speeds (which is twice as fast as PCIe 2.0 and 4x as fast as PCIe 1.0) don't really make much of a measurable difference in performance even with high end video cards coupled with a top end overclocked CPU running graphically intense games.

The "5xx" vs. "4xx" in the model numbers just means that the 550 is a newer chip design than the 460. It's the "x50" vs. "x60" part that's more telling of relative performance. (Granted, I may be oversimplifying here.)

I have a GTX 460 (1GB model) myself, and it's more than adequate for CoH. Frankly, my AMD CPU is more of a limiting factor than the video card.