I'm way out of date on my grapics card, I currently have a NVIDIA GeForce 7100 / NVIDIA nForce 630i and need a new card, pretty bad. My computer couldn't handle Tom's EndWar, so that's pretty bad. Suggestions everyone? I saw the new Radeon 5800 Eyefinity, but I don't think I could afford it, and I'm happy with my 24" HP moniter. I don't need 6.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/geforce_family.html

http://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/graphics/ati-radeon-hd-5000/Pages/ati-radeon-hd-5000.aspx

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH&Description=graphics

http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=88&pgno=0

Have fun with these

........You made me laugh, SO hard. XD

First of all your powersupply would probably buckle, smoke, and explode, in that order, if you hooked something as tame as a 5830 up to it. Second you haven't provided us with the information we need.

http://www.cpuid.com/cpuz.php
http://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/

Download them both, I need a screenshot of the main GPUz tab, and a screenshot of the CPU, motherboard, and graphics CPUz tabs. And make sure to crop them to just the program because your desktop is unimportant and makes it a pain in the ass since most image hosts resize by default.

Finally, open up your PC, and find your power supply, the box with all the wires coming out of it, the power cord goes into it, all that fun stuff. Read the side label and find me its total wattage. It should be between 300-500w assuming this is the shitty pre-built type of PC that I think it is.

Get to it.

Edit: Oh and don't forget to tell us what you're looking to spend on this upgrade.

Vrael we don't know if he even has a PCI-E x16 slot, much less a PSU that could handle anything worth plugging into it. Proper procedure is key in tech matters.

Ok, I'm working on getting all that put up. Will probably have it posted in a bit. Also, Ex, I want to complement you. I have lots of respect for you, and I want to say, where I come from in florida, you'd be the king of insulters. Or, like the african american kids like to say here, King of Grease. (The kids here say grease when you own somebody, It's kind of retarded but yeah.) You make me rofl a lot when I read your posts. (In a good way, not an insulting way, And I mean the king of insulters in a good way too, don't want this to be taken the wrong way.)

[quote Sexcalibear]
........You made me laugh, SO hard. XD

First of all your powersupply would probably buckle, smoke, and explode, in that order, if you hooked something as tame as a 5830 up to it.[/quote]

My PC tower is currently inside my desk (Yes it has breathing room), so I can't really take it apart atm. Heres all the other info though.

Damn shame, you have a shit motherboard, but that E2180 could run 3.4GHz on a decent board.

You have a PCI-E x16, but your CPU, and probably your RAM amount are going to limit any GPU worth buying.

I'm going to declare this another machine not worth upgrading. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

Someone else is probably going to come in here and be like EX IS WRONG BECAUSE IF YOU BUY THIS CARD YOU WILL HAVE BETTER GAME PERFORMANCE, and they're right, but for what you're going to pay, and the system you're going to be putting it in, you'd be better off saving whatever money you were going to spend and putting it towards a new PC.

How much cash do you have currently?

Well, that sucks. How much cash do I have? My wallet probably has about $16 in it. But birthday is coming up towards the end of the month, I doubt I'd be getting a new computer any time soon though. I appreciate your response, I'd rather know my motherboard sucks than going and buying with no clue. I had a feeling my computer wasn't that great considering I got it january 2007, but I understand stuff is constantly updating. Hopefully very soon I want to try and get money saved up for a new laptop. They're pretty cheap right now. (At least from what I've seen in stores.) Thanks again Ex, I do appreciate it. I'm going to definitely look into getting a new system, and make sure it has a decent graphics card. I know a lot of people on here built their own computers, but I doubt I'd be able to do that.

Don't buy a pre-built. Build your own. Cheaper and better performance. You might be able to re-use things like your harddrive and disk drive so that you can save more money for new components.

When you get all your money together, come post here, and I'll design you something.

Alright, Thanks Ex. When I get a good amount of money put together I'll come and post again.

foxconn does indeed sucks. However, I see no reason you can't get a cheap graphics card.
9600 GT - $65 after MIR, today only. It's more than powerful enough to play End War, but you'll be struggling through some low graphics. It will run just about anything, just the newer stuff won't run very well. It's an EoL product, so only get it if you really need the graphics and gathering money is going to be difficult/take longer than you want it to.

Power consumption isn't bad either. Using a better setup, they're getting ~200 W max. Add a bit of an overhead on that, and I'd be comfortable with even a 350W PSU. Make sure you check though before you ever upgrade a computer. If you experience system instability, get a better PSU. Seasonic/corsair/silverstone/antec earthwatts/enermax/hec(I think) are all good quality PSUs, and there are many more. Just don't get rosewill or something that looks too good to be true. Then again, I have a free 500W PSU which served me well for a long time.

Also note that you can't really overclock prebuilt computers without flashing a custom bios (something I wouldn't want to do). That makes Ex's complaint on the sucky motherboard moot. I'm assuming that the 630i chipset has a PCI-e x16 slot needed for graphics, and foxconn actually put it in there. You won't know for sure unless you open it up and check, though.

Building a computer is like a really expensive lego set with 12 parts. It's not hard at all, and if you do it once, you'll learn so much about computers in general that you'll start to hate everyone who ever thought that computers are "too hard".

If you can re-use your: case, optical drive, hard drive, that leave you with replacing RAM, PSU, cpu/mobo/gfx. $400 is easily manageable to get a kickass system. You'll need to procure your own OS though. Eventually you'll want to upgrade that Hard drive and case, though. The nice part about cases is they never really need to be replaced, so you really only want to ever buy a good quality case. Hard drives shouldn't last much more than 5 years.

I would suggest you spend more than $400 bucks on building a computer. Sure you can make a good computer for that, but it will not stay good for long. I know, I've experienced it. The last computer I build I spent about a kilobuck on back in '07 and it still runs everything new on max no problems. My previous started chugging about a year later. As far as video cards go, I'm rocking 8800GTs in SLI and they still do the job quite well, If you can't find them anymore, they are now called the 9800GT I believe. Good performance for a decent price.

Prices have gone down a lot in the past 3 years.
CPU: $100
mobo: $80
GFX: $150
RAM: $80
PSU: $40
So $450.
I spent 3 years ago:
CPU: $185
mobo: $200
GFX: $200
RAM: $100
PSU: $0
I considered a "budget" build back then, what with the 8800 being brand new.

The 8800 GTs are now called GTS 250s.

Dang, craps changed, I really need to keep up with this stuff. They need to stick with a name on graphics cards too, oh well, switching names every year is good for business.

This is my current situation:

I just found out last night after I left this post that I had an open savings account from 2007, which has $50.
I plan on adding all the money I get to that account, so next visit it will probably have $70 in it.
This is the unfortunate part: I need to make an entire computer, I can't re-use anything because I use my parents computer for everything. I doubt they'd let me scrap their computer and take the parts.
Also, I want this to be a gaming computer, because knowing my motherboard is crap and my graphics card is horrible I have no idea how I'm going to do with SC2 when it finally comes out. It'd probably make my computer buckle, smoke, and explode in that order. *Quotes Ex* But yeah. I know newegg can provide cheap prices, but I want you guys to do this list of parts for me because I know I'd be a complete epic failure.

I agree with rockz here. When my computer gets old I usually just invest in a current, low budget gfx which is way overpowered compared to my cpu but it still increases game performance considerably for a low price. And it lets me increase some settings like shaders and stuff that is solely handled by the gfx so I still have all those fancy graphic effects.
This strategy buys me about 2 years until I have to get a whole new computer.
The only thing you do have to keep in mind is that you don't get over your psu limits. So you have to get your computer out of hiding and find out its wattage even if that means hard, manual labor.