Which GFX card?

[Spawney]

Hi all Ive had a 5700 from geforce, sent it back cos it was shite, had a 9600 XT from ATi and sent that back cos it was shite.. and im looking for a decent card that will play HL2 on medium settings. the 9600 XT was the best but it was struggling for some reason.

I have a

AMD Athlon2400+ @ 2.5 GHz
768 meg pc2700 ddr @ 166 mhz
40 gig maxtor diamondmax hdd
300 watt psu

would i benefit from 256 meg more ram?
im gna upgrade my psu to 600 watt anyway so ignore that.

but im looking for a decent card that will play HL2 on medium settings with decent fps ( i.e above 40)

 

[Halki]

man that card had to pull 40 fps at least... on a rig like that... i plyd it too (spec - i only had 256ram) on min.det. but it runned fine... not sure 'bout g-force cards, but x600 or better x800 should do the job if that one was too weak
and if u have 450-500 free ram upon startin win (which i suppose you do if you don't have tons of shitty run-on-startup soft installed) it should be enuff

 

[Spawney]

ok mate. my friend has just said i can have his 9800 pro card @ xt speeds. think this will be a noticeable difference from the 9600 xt?
i may just get another 256 ram to be on the safe side.

wat ya think mate?

cheers for the replies

 

[Halki]

i think that'll be ok... geez i really hit the shit when i wrote x600
one pal of mine just bought 9800pro, it's quite a punch, but it could be better (everything could be better)
how many ramslots do u have? looks like you'll be full after this one... better sell the 256 u already have n buy a new one (or sell everything and buy ddr400)

 

[YohanN]

IMHO GeForce 6600 of better 6600 GT is the best in mainstream now, ati offers nothing there now in this middle class coz i dont think 9800 is a good chioce now, too old architecture (cehck shaders version etc....)

 

[Spawney]

Halki i have 3 slots so i can have a 512,256,256

I was looking at the 6600 GT looks good. But i dno :s