This week I finally bit the bullet and upgraded the graphics card in my computer, for those who have been reading you will notice I am slowly upgrading my computer piece by piece it seems. First it was my motherboard, then RAM and power supply and now my graphics card.
The reason that I wanted to upgrade my graphic card was that there was a couple of games on the PC that I want to play, specifically World in Conflict and the Witcher. I also suspect that latest Total war game in development Empire Total War will probably require me to upgrade.
So this week I picked up a Gigabyte ATI 4850 Graphics card, GV-R485-512H-B, I choose to go with an ATI 4850 since everyone seems to agree it is best bang for the buck on the market. The ATI 4850 is actually almost as fast $800+ cards from Nvidia at a fourth the cost. Recently I had stayed away from ATI since they had released some pretty buggy drivers, but at the cost difference I figured I would give them another shot. It is really good to see that it appears ATI has a real winner on its hands with the 4850 and 4870 graphics cards.
The ATI 4850 is a huge upgrade from my previous card, an Nvidia 7600GT 256 megabyte video card. One thing is for certain this card is physically much larger then my old card, I had to move some hard drives around to get it to physically fit in my case. It also requires more power since it take a direct power line from my power supply. I believe the ATI 4850 is about twelve generations newer then my 7600GT. When I got my 7600GT it was getting old.
I have not had much of an opportunity to play many games with it, other then quickly to see what I can get the graphics settings to and generally speaking I can run every game I tried to max graphic settings or very near the max. I suspect this card will last me along time since generally I don’t play graphically intensive games; I am more of strategy game player. But having this horse power is really nice, I don’t remember the last time I had a cutting edge graphics card.
Not sure what my next upgrade, but all that is left is my monitor, I am still using a Viewsonic P90f CRT or my CPU. Right now I am running an Intel Core 2 Duo 1.8 ghz processor and I am thinking of upgrading to a Intel Core 2 Quad 2.4 or faster processor. For monitors I am thinking dual or 22” high end Samsung screens.
I am a big believer in spending a little more on your monitor, for a couple of reasons. The first being the monitor generally last the longest of any component that makes up your computer, with exception of maybe your case. I got my Viewsonic P90f over six years ago, needless say everything else in my computer has changed several times since then. So I see my monitor as more of an investment and I justify spending more on it or them since I will using it for so long. The only reason I am looking upgrading up monitor is my monitor is starting to show it age and I want to go to dual screen setup.
The other reason I can justify spending more on my monitor is that I am already blind a bat without my glasses. So that last thing I need to do is strain my eyes looking a cheap monitor.
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