"Cheap" is so hard to work on :P Just give us a realistic "around this price" for the graphics card. If you spend too little the improvement over the 7900 may not be worth it... would be good to know what 7900 it is, as there were several different version I think. If you can't tell by looking in the device manager, the appearance might tell you which model:

7900 GTX
7900 GT & GS (the GT and GS appear to be of the same design from what pictures I can find)

Okay, so I looked around bench marks and general price performance comparisons recently, and here is what I reckon:

From around £80-£120 you should be able to find an ATI HD 4850 512MB, which should perform great for the price.

If you can go up to around £120-£150, both the ATI HD 4870 1GB and Nvidia GTX 260 will be very good cards.

If you're tight on money, from around £50-£80 you can get the ATI HD 4670 or the Nvidia 9600 GSO, but don't expect ground breaking performance over your 7900, especially if it's a 7900 GTX.

[edit]Personally I'm not sure on the HD 4870 and GTX 260... they might be bottle-necked too much by your CPU to be worth the price. Just a quick look shows this HD 4850 for £86, which is good value.

Thanks very much. I looked to replace my graphics card a fair few months back because its been dying for some time. When I looked back then I was favouring a geforce 8800 or 8600 but things have moved on now and prices are better.
I would actualy prefer the £50-£80 price range. I'm also going to add a gig of ram (or two) depending on price etc.
Thanks for your replys, I'll have a little search my-self now I know what to look out for.

I think I like the sound of the ATI 4670. Theres a Asus model on ebuyer for £56. That suits me :) Need a gig of ram to go with it now. I'm not certain what I need to go in this motherboard :o

Pointless spending more than 30 quid on a graphics card as they'll mostly be too powerful anyway.

The card you have in it is more than good enoug TBH. If its breaking, then I would go onto ebay, look for a 6800 GT or Ultra.
or even a working replacement. Its fine, anything more would be a wate.

Failing that, you could buy something like a new 8500 GT ot 8600 GT, they are not very good, but again, for that CPU they would be more than good enough and they're cheap, which is why they come with some many modern pc's.

I would consider the 6800 GT though. Tons on ebay and one of the best cards ever made.

Anything more will be a waste and end up costing more than the whole system.

Missed your post the first time around. You've got me thinking now :) I suppose it makes sense really.
What makes the 6800 GT so good?
Cheers

Those 6800GT's are around £40/60 on ebay. Wouldn't I be better off with the ATI I mention below?

Yes, just get the ATI. More hassle than it's worth getting out of production cards if you ask me, unless your budget is really low.

you got a geforce7900 and you're considering buying a geforce 6800. seems reasonable.

Why do you need to upgrade when your current hardware is fine for just about anything? Upgrading for the 2 or so games that need uber hardware is not worth it, both due to the cost and simply that the high-end games aren't any good.

My graphics cards broken so it needs replacing. May as well upgrade it for the sake of £50 rather than replace it for £30 :)

How does 15-20 sound then?

http://shop.ebay.co.uk/items/_W0QQ_sopZ2?_nkw...;_osacat=0

I forgot about the 6600gt, its a toned down version of the 6800 gt and still a really good card.

I had the 6600 GT before I had the 6800 gt on pretty much the same cpu. Lets jsut say when i upgraded to the 6800 gt, i was disappointed because the only game that pushed it was doom 3 and when I realised the benchmark scores were returning very similar scores, I realised it was probably the best value card at that time.

i just don't see the point in spending 50-60 thats not really gonna give you any boost over the nvidia. you should spend as little as possible on that system as you know the first chance you get to replace it, you will.

6600gt ? 6800gt ? man I had to look twice it's a June 2009 thread
(but idd they're cheap)

Cheap and were the top cards at the time his CPU was worth a shit. His CPU is from late 2004 remember.

sure but coming from a 7900 it'll be a downgrade

Yes but when you consider that the games he's going to be playing willl probably play fine on the 6600 GT and the 7900 GT's are going for 3 times the price of the 6600 GT you'll probably find that he'll get similar in game performance for what he wants to do.

No point in tying up money in that system for performace he probably won't use or benefit from, especially as its an old system and likely to be replaced within 12 months.

It'll fly through quake live and play doom 3 quake 4 half life2 etc.
Those games were the pinnacle of the last gen engines.

It wont run new stuff no matter what GPU he puts in there.

still a downgrade from his previous card, no matter what you could try to acrobaticly argue

I have!.

Yes its a downgrade, but if its DOWNGRADE and still offers him top performance in the games he's going to play at a fraction of the cost of replacing it then that is why its worth doing and my whole point.

Not really a difficult concept to understand is it.

If he wants the same performance, then he'll have to spend 3 times as much and probably not notice any performance gains in the software he plays.

I understould your advise to start with dude - good advise. Makes alot of sense. I'm just considering the 4670 because its such a reasonable price and would probably be ok for me in the future with a cpu upgrade.
I might just go with the lower end geforce like your suggesting though.

*advice* :)

just get ATI HD4770, lose that ancient 6600/6800gt crap

before you buy your RAM, check if you need DDR or DDR2 !
look at your motherboard for the modelnumber, or just take out a RAM module to see the type (PC1600 - PC3200 is DDR, PC4200 - PC6400 is DDR2)
considering the VGA, I guess you need DDR, but check it!

for VGA I would take a ATI HD4730 or HD4770, nothing faster (waste for that cpu)

Thanks. I'm pretty sure I'm still on regular old DDR. I think I will actualy go with the ATI for the sake of a few quid. I can always use it in the future if I bother to upgrade :)
I was looking at the 4670 though because of the price - £56.

well, that will do fine for your current games, but not something you want in a new rig / for new games

considering you will do the standard 4 giga ram upgarde, iwatch for a proper 64 bit os, too, if you wanna use more than 3 gb of ram (4 gb minus the adresses allocated for peripherals, if you got 1 giga graphics card, 32 bit OSes will adress about 2.5 gb ram only)

CPU-Z can tell you what mobo, ram and CPU you have, and GPU-Z can tell you what gfx card you have :)

http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/1379/Tec...0.3.4.html

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

Thanks

get i 2gb ddr2 ram kit, very very cheap nowadays.. and then a ati4650.. cheaper than 4670, and only a few frames(2-5)slower.. cant run monster titles anyway.. and the DDR3 version.. i believe they still do the ddr2 shit..

My board wont take DDR2 :(
The tests I looked at showed quite a big jump from DDR3 4670 over the lower models like the 4650. I can't remember what the test games were though. And they were run on superior CPU's to mine, obviously.

tomshardware:
"We've seen some DDR3-equipped Radeon HD 4650 cards approaching the $50 price point, and this makes for a card that packs a lot more punch than its DDR2-equipped cousins do. Overclocking this card might bring it surprisingly close to Radeon HD 4670 performance, so it's an especially good value for tweakers."

you decide.. 4670 if you dont like to fidle with it, for best performance..

Ok, went with the Asus 1Gb DDR3 4670 at £50 and some matching pair crucial ram 1Gb. "Love" the card, looks amazing compared to my old geforce. Well worth the extra few quid.
Agreed - it did make alot of sense to go with a cheaper geforce but I'm pleased I spent a little extra to be honest.
PC is a different animal now and running "really" well. Especialy after realising that my CPU was running too hot and re-fitting the heatsink with some new thermal paste.
Thanks for the input guys.