Help selecting the right video card

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STrooperTK421

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 8, 2009
Messages
466
Ok, I'm on a severely limited budget, and I have this little off the shelf PC that I bought a while back and I need a video card for it. Don't laugh but these are the specs:

AMD Athlon II X2 250u CPU @ 1.61Ghz (not so good...)
4 Gigs ram
A HDD, etc.

I would like to play some games as I have missed out on the past five years of PC gaming. I know I'm not going to get 6516584FPS with 3512654x AA and all that shit, but:

I have a 28 inch monitor that only does 1920 x 1200
I don't really care about having AA ability. Unless I get really close and do an "inspection" I can't tell the difference as I am legally blind...yes, I can still play games and do so quite well, but things like AA are almost useless to me.
I'm happy gaming at a lower resolution if 1920x1200 isn't possible, I do like having the eye candy cranked up and will sacrifice AA, resolution etc, to have that.

I know my CPU is going to be somewhat of a limiting factor, but I'm sure there is a card (and better power supply) that I can get that will allow me to play current titles, plus be able to hit up Steam. So, what would some of you recommend?
 
What board are you running and what exactly is your "severely limited budget"?
 
Its a little eMachines (yeah, yeah... :) ) and it will need another power supply (easy) but just not sue what card to put into it. I will be able to spend around $275 or so total for both parts.
 
Thanks for the suggestions. Based on some loose and nasty measurements I believe a 6850 will fit the case, it might be tight though, I will also have no problems getting a standard sized ATX power supply to fit as I ran across a discussion about that on Google.
 
STrooperTK421 said:
So, you think that a card like that would allow me to play in 720p with details turned up minus AA and the like?
Click to expand...

4850 is still a solid card that will still be bottlenecked by that cpu most of the time. Even a cheap 9600gt should be enough for 720p and it draws next to nothing. The only thing that those two cards lack is DX11 support.
 
A 4850 at 720p is like an HD4890 at 1440x900, or an HD5850 at 1680x1050, or an HD5870 at 1920x1080, or an HD6970 at 1920x1200. Using such a low resolution gives you enormous performance on even quite old cards.
 
I guess my last and obvious question to you then is, is it even worth it? Would investing in a 4850 for example (and another PS) be worth the little amount of money I have to spend? I mean, I don't want to invest in this and find out that its not going to work... Stupid shitty slow ass CPU...
 
It'll work, but it won't be as fast as a 4850 can potentially be. If it's simply making a PC with no video card work, then yeah, go for it. If it's an upgrade from a weaker card, we need to know what the weaker card is.
 
I am currently using the on board video. I think I'm going to wait and see if I can scrape together enough to get a barebones system with a little more power, but thanks for the help. :)
 
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