Hi,
For my birthday, my wife is prepared to allow some frivilous expense.
I recently got a pair of 24" monitors, and my 8800GT doesn't perform quite as well as it used to at such high resolution (I like playing Live For Speed, but I've had to turn off some of the AA to get it to run smoothly).
I thought I would get a new graphics card to see me through the next couple of years. I have a general prejudice against ATI drivers from way back, so I did look at nVidia cards, but they seem to be a bit behind the times, and a bit pricey too compared to the performance of Radeons.
I'm thinking at this point in time, a DX11 capable card would make most sense, to give me as much future-proofing as possible. The maximum budget would be in the £200-£250 range, so I think that should get me something half decent, but one concern I have is that the Radeons (5830 and 5850) seems to be listed as PCI Express v2.1, whereas my DFI-Lanparty M2RSH has v2.0 slots - will they work in a v2.0 slot? I'm not prepared to swap motherboard at this time.
I use Windows 7 Ultimate, and my gaming is totally driving based. The only games I fire up are Live For Speed, and very occasionally Racedriver Grid. Obviously, if there was an all singing, all dancing racing sim to be released next week, then I could quite easily want to play that across 2 1920x1200 monitors.
Have I given enough information for a reasonable recommendation? I'm not necessarily keen to fork out unnecessarily, so if a £160 card will work as well for me as a £250, then that's all good.
Cheers,
Steve.
For my birthday, my wife is prepared to allow some frivilous expense.
I recently got a pair of 24" monitors, and my 8800GT doesn't perform quite as well as it used to at such high resolution (I like playing Live For Speed, but I've had to turn off some of the AA to get it to run smoothly).
I thought I would get a new graphics card to see me through the next couple of years. I have a general prejudice against ATI drivers from way back, so I did look at nVidia cards, but they seem to be a bit behind the times, and a bit pricey too compared to the performance of Radeons.
I'm thinking at this point in time, a DX11 capable card would make most sense, to give me as much future-proofing as possible. The maximum budget would be in the £200-£250 range, so I think that should get me something half decent, but one concern I have is that the Radeons (5830 and 5850) seems to be listed as PCI Express v2.1, whereas my DFI-Lanparty M2RSH has v2.0 slots - will they work in a v2.0 slot? I'm not prepared to swap motherboard at this time.
I use Windows 7 Ultimate, and my gaming is totally driving based. The only games I fire up are Live For Speed, and very occasionally Racedriver Grid. Obviously, if there was an all singing, all dancing racing sim to be released next week, then I could quite easily want to play that across 2 1920x1200 monitors.
Have I given enough information for a reasonable recommendation? I'm not necessarily keen to fork out unnecessarily, so if a £160 card will work as well for me as a £250, then that's all good.
Cheers,
Steve.