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I'm getting a new desktop, and I am wondering what would be a good video card for my money. The other parts of the machine are easy enough to figure out, but video cards have always left me a bit confused. I think the GeForce GTX 285 looks like a good value in terms of bang for buck, but I've been out of the computer hardware loop for so long I have no idea if I am overlooking anything obvious.

What kind of budget range?

Up to $3,000 for the whole computer, including the monitor. WoW is dirt cheap entertainment, so I have a bigger new computer budget than ever before.

Edit: So, I'm thinking $500 for the card? I've never had any real options beyond what the <$800 computers I had before came with standard.

Pretty much anything from this list might do the trick, then. With GDDR3 being the standard 2gb should be plenty. (I have to admit I don't have any first hand experience with any of those particular brands, but they're nvidia chipsets which generally aren't bad).

The cost difference between a 275 GTX and a 285 GTX is not all that great ATM. Unless your willing to pay a 200$ premium for 20% better performance I'd spend the money on extras.

I think XFX gives double lifetime warranties on their cards, IIRC.

Commander 598 wrote:I think XFX gives double lifetime warranties on their cards, IIRC.

Lifetime warranties are not like life sentences, they are life-time. For computer equipment however a three or five year warranty should be sufficient for everything. As most people upgrade at least after five years.

Tech Report does articles every so often with a list of suggested builds, they're a good place to start from.

$3000 is a bit overkill for piecing together your own computer, even including a new monitor and peripherals. As a quick note from the TR article, they have a Core i7 build priced at ~$1300 - if you stuck to your $3000 target, you'd have $1700 left for monitor(s), speakers, and other peripherals as desired.

Interestingly, none of their builds includes a video card that costs more than $200. Really, you don't need to spend over $300 to get a very good video card any more, nor over $200 to get a powerful CPU that will handle any game on the market. Hard drives and RAM are dirt cheap. It's never been less expensive to build a powerful desktop computer.

$3,000 is how much I have in my new computer fund. I give myself $150 each month to spend on everything from WoW & EVE to eating out, and that's it. Everything I don't spend from that goes into my new computer fund. Getting hooked on WoW saved me tons of that by cutting down on the number of new computer games I buy, resulting in me having a much bigger budget than I expected after 4 years of saving.

But thanks for the pointers, this is really helpful.

You might as well go out and drop, 1500 of your 3000$ computer fund on a nice 45 inch 1080P 120Htz TV as a new monitor. Or if you don't have the size for that, something in the 36-42 inch range if you need to buy a desk big enough to hold that as well. 1,500 can easily put together a kick ass gaming system which you can two years from now upgrade only by swapping out the video card and maybe the processor.

Mr Bean wrote:

Commander 598 wrote:I think XFX gives double lifetime warranties on their cards, IIRC.

Lifetime warranties are not like life sentences, they are life-time. For computer equipment however a three or five year warranty should be sufficient for everything. As most people upgrade at least after five years.

Don't look at me, I didn't name their "buy me" gimmicks.

Commander 598 wrote:

Mr Bean wrote:

Commander 598 wrote:I think XFX gives double lifetime warranties on their cards, IIRC.

Lifetime warranties are not like life sentences, they are life-time. For computer equipment however a three or five year warranty should be sufficient for everything. As most people upgrade at least after five years.

Don't look at me, I didn't name their "buy me" gimmicks.

The "double lifetime warranty" thing means that if you sell the card to someone, they get their own new second "lifetime warranty" rather than the warranty being invalidated or needing to go through the original owner for service. Not a bad deal.

I think the current ATI graphics card offerings are better performance for the money today than NVidia. Check out Toms Hardwares latest graphics card guide as well, they give recommendations at a range of price points and reasons why.

frogcurry wrote:I think the current ATI graphics card offerings are better performance for the money today than NVidia. Check out Toms Hardwares latest graphics card guide as well, they give recommendations at a range of price points and reasons why.

In my case the only reason I'm going to choose an ATI card for my next upgrade early next year is the problems nVidia cards have with ACDSee photo viewing/editing software.

This may have been addressed already by nVidia, but I'm not willing to spend $200 on a new video card and find out that it has the exact same problem with ACDSee's software that my old card has.