I'm planning to upgrade my PC, from Geforce 2 to " the best graphics card" If I upgrade my graphics card, does it mean I have to upgrade our RAM? By the way which is better the Nvidia Geforce series or ATI Radeon?
telling us your current card means nothing as it could be on either agp 1.0, agp 2.0, agp 3.0 or PCI. give us your motherbaord make(download CPUz and check mainboard tab give us the info) your need to upgrade ram is independeant of the card. for gaming, 512mb doesn't really cut it any more. 768 is kind of a minimum right now. with the age of your system, the best card for it costs more than a compareable PCI-e card and a cheap motherboard/CPU combo furthermore, you'de likely need a new power supply. that's assuming you want the very best card... which would be a 7800GS AGP we'de be able to server you better with a given budget... EDIT: as for which is better. it depends both have niches.
Idealy for gaming now a days you want 1gb. ANd yeah, we need to know if you have PCI - E or not, because if you don't, what graphics cards you can get that are actually half good is very limited. Use everest to find out what mobo you have and tell us. Thanks.
as a minimum... and yes it's my systemm looking back i probably should have spenta little less in a few areas but live and learn...
without a budget? I've heard of a system using 24,000 opterons in it... so 24,000,000 3.0GHz Amd Opterons Few TB of DDR400 ram with 2-2-2-2 timings radeon x1900XTX radeon x1900XT CF edition mass solidstate memory configuration raid array of around 1,000 15,000rmp harddrives as backup why? a more realistic one would more or less be scaling that all down, single processor(likely conroe) 4GB DDR2-1000ram(though there would be no real performance diference between 2GB and 4GB) two WD1500 raptors in RAID0 and two hitachi deskstars for stoarage. and an acceptably priced(1200ish) on would more ro elss be conroe 6600 2GB DDR800sdram 250GB WD cavier HDD x1800XT or 7900GT(or two 7600GTs in SLi) with a moderate budget (1000ish) conroe 6300 2GB DDR800sdram 250GB cavier drive x850 XT or 7600GT one thing though, ultimate costs 5 times as much as really good and the performance gains it acheives aren't really noticeable. Trust me a 10% real world performance boost is more or less negligeable. Going from 65FPS ingame to 72 isn't even perceiveable. I personally consider spending more than 1.5K for a base system(excludes sound and monitor) foolishness, the system will become obsolete just as fast as a cheaper system, I'm sitting next to a $6,000 PI system(only salveageable part is the monitor) right now it can't really do any more than my mothers old 386 DX system despite costing 4 times as much, two years later in time. again spending 1/2 as much twice as often(or a little bit less frequently) gets you setup better on the whole if you know what to do.
Your points are valid, xelink; but some people just want the best thing at that moment. They don't want to be behind the pack once they get it, and still be at the bottom of the food chain later. They want to be high in glory with their computer and lower on the food chain later.
you could get a new system twice as often if you were more moderate and sell the old system, give it away etc...
