Need Some Advice: Upgrading Vid Card

[artushka24]

Hi guys. I just need a few words of advice from someone who knows about this kind of stuff more then I do (and that being said: I don't know a whole lot lol). Here's a breakdown of my situation: I have an aging machine (about four years old) it has a Gigabyte K7 Triton Series Motherboard (GA-7VA-C with a VIA KT333 chipset), 1.5Gb Kingston Extreme Ram (3*512mb), a Raidmax 450 watt ATX power supply, AMD Athlon 2500XP+ Processor, on-board soundcard, running Windows XP PRO Service pack 1. Last November, I upgraded my graphics card from an Nvidia GeForce 5200FX 128MB AGP to a PNY Nvidia GeForce 6600 256MB AGP 8X(not GT or OC). It worked fine for about three or four months with no hickups or lock ups. Battlefield 2 ran smooth as silk to my surprise online with full graphics, high res, and antiaisling turned up to 4X. Then something happened, I don't know what. Now when I play a game on full graphics (happens mostly on driving games) the game freezes for a few seconds and a tearing or a "terterterterter" sound comes out of my speakers, then the game goes back to normal and everything is fine. These episodes occur about twice a minute and last about three seconds. I uninstalled the old drivers using a driver cleaner, installed new ones, cleaned the fan from dust and it had no effect. Then I thought my power supply had something to do with it, maybe it does? But why did it work fine for a while ane then quit all of a sudden? Anyway, also when I go into display and advanced settings, clicking on my video card it says the driver version and under bus it says "AGP 4X". Isn't my card AGP 8X? Hmmm... Is that ok or is something wrong? Now I'm upgrading my power supply to a Thermaltake 500watt and would like to do the same with my video card. The thing is I'm stuck between two choices: the GeForce 6800XT 512MB AGP 8X and the GeForce 7600GS 512MB. Which of these cards will provide me with the best performance boost over my current card and will it be able to "coexist" with my motherboard? I really really need your help guys, all advice will be greatly appreciated. Thanks

[bigjmaster14]

They have 7800 gs for agp but if it shows it as agp 4x then maybe thats the max it can support and you may have to upgrade that as well.

[glc]

Your motherboard has a 4x AGP slot - 8x cards are compatible and will run at 4x.

[artushka24]

When looking for a vid card sould I look for clock speed/memory speed or amount of ram? Which is more important and what will show more performance and quality? And what benefits does GDDR3 have over GDDR2? I saw two identical cards but one with GDDR3 and the other with GDDR2, which is better? What brands would you recommend (I have PNY right now and it's good, I haven't had any other brands though), need something that won't cause lock ups and will have a good factory cooling system. PNY? XFX? GFB? or eVGA? And which card would you advise me to get if I can only spend less then $200? Thanks

[jfk]

Faster clocks are better, but there is a trade off with performance/price. Get GDDR3, it is superior to GDDR2. For NVIDIA, eVGA is probably as good as you can get.

[dogdude16]

here is a really helpfull guide when buying video cards here is the link http://www.gamespot.com/features/6153327/index.html