Humberton Guard Guild Website

As some of you know I'm playing EVE Online for the moment. They just released their Trinity patch with updated graphics. However, you need a graphics card that supports Shader Model 3.0. The card I have, an ATi Radeon X850 XT PE, only supports SM2. State of the art and costing me a kidney 2 years ago but oh well. That's life in pc hardware

What I can do is just replace it with a midrange Geforce or Radeon from todays line-up which do support SM3, but I could also go a bit further, like maybe 8800 GT (seems to be THE bang for the buck card these days) or SLi as I got an SLi ready mobo. I can't go too low in midrange as then I will have a card that might be SM3 proof but slower overall than my current card!

On top of that the CPU I'm using is also gettign a bit long in the teeth for current and future games. A simple single core Athlon64 X3200

I really wanted to wait till next spring to upgrade or build a completely new pc but I want juicy graphics and I want some decent power for WAR, Crysis and what not

running crysis demo on amd64x2 4200+ with 1g ram and a 512 meg nvidia 8600gts and its smooth and fast, dunno if thats any indictaion of what you might need.

are you running AGP or pci express?

mine is pci-e

pci-e here

The PC is not ancient, it's just not very current anymore, which makes it quite hard to decide!

Hmm, you could buy a top end card now, and reuse it when you upgrade later.

Though apparently you don't get the benefit of the good cards if your processor is underpowered, so might be best just getting a cheaper 6 series or 7 series.

Yea bummer And all just because of SM3 support. I should just wait a few monthes longer really.

can get a 6 series for 20odd quid - that'll do you till you buy the bigger beast

Fingoniel wrote:can get a 6 series for 20odd quid - that'll do you till you buy the bigger beast

thats about 30 euros

Hmm. Sounds like a good idea. It's not exactly breaking the bank getting an interim el cheapo card that supports SM3

I'll hurl myself into the pc shop one of these days (always fun around the christmas shopping season)

If I was to upgrade my card now I think that I would go for the Ge-Force 9800GX2 card. It sells for around £100 and it is basically 2 9800GT cards stuck together (So in theory you can run quad core GPUs if you pop this thing in SLI mode) - They outpace the new 260GTX cards, which are over twice the price, a pretty good sell if you ask me.

woot, thread necromancy

We've still got two machines running AGP cards here, so it's mobo+card+processor+possibly memory for the next upgrade (can't remember if it's DDR or DDR2).

Probably just rebuild them.

In regard to graphics cards you can get an GeForce 8800 GTX for quite cheap now especially if you are going to be huying from e-bay. An 8800 GTX is easily enough to run most new games on high or even top graphics. The only thing you might struggle on is games such as crysis on high but for warhammer online it should be more than enough.

You can also pick up a nice dual core CPU for under £50 on ebay if you find a good deal, enough to run almost anything on high graphical settings without any stutter or jumpiness. For instance i ran crysis on high for most graphical settings on an AMD 2.6 GHz dual core card and the 8800 GTx like i recommended before.

If needed you can also pick up some fast (600 Mhz) DDR2 ram for under £20 if your lucky enough to find a nice deal.

Basically im just reading off my computers specs, i got the same spec computer about 1 year ago as a custom deal for about £900 so by now it should be a lot cheaper. Hope this helps =]

have a 768MB Geforce 8800 GTX which worked great with WAR in the CB, though i do also have a Intel Q6600 G0 quad core cpu overclocked to 3.2GHz too.

if its any help Egor was running a 7800 512 AGP untill about a week ago and lotro/WAR were running fine in something like 1400 x900 1600 x1050 was too much. Issue there was

that was on a Semperon 64 3000 1.5 GB Ram Win XP DX9

I had an 8600 256 pcie on Lotro pretty much maxed out except for rvr on another pc Vista 2GB RAM DX10

Egor is now using that on a Athlon x2 3800 but we havent streched it yet Win XP 4GB RAM DX9 Basically it was time to make the jump too some got a pretty Good MoBO and stuffed in CPU card ec that had come out of my pcs over time.

currently got an 8800 1GB pcie on main pc running at 1600 x 1050 and thats nice too!