The name of a great graphics card for PC gaming

[Wayne]

I know they're supposed to be expensive, but could anyone give me the name of a really good graphics card I could buy to bring my PC graphics to a level that's higher than the current gen consoles? The PC I'm using now looks ok, but not good enough based on the descriptions I've heard regarding the capabilities of a true gaming rig.

Thanks

[Betty]

http://www.sapphiretech.com/presentation/?lid=1 (They sponsor PMS clan :3)
Sapphire has some good cards
I won a graphics card (which was super awesome. I flipped my shit) and Its great (: Its in the desktop at home. Unfortunately none of my family members really appreciate it because they don't understand it.

(Nvidia is also good -my laptop uses one and its a beast (for a laptop))

[Wayne]

Thanks Betty
You know, they're not as expensive as i expected.

[Archangel]

B... you didn't even give over the top tech specs on anything! For shame. Plus, Sapphire is just a redistributor; they don't make any cards, they just get them from the OEM for a cost, then rebrand and possibly add some after-market alterations, then resell them over to the next set of distributors (ie. shops). Sapphire are pretty a'ight, though.

Now, let a real man handle this one >.>

*ahem*

It's not likely Wayne, but if your current computer is old enough, your motherboard might be spouting an AGP interface, in which case you'll have some serious troubles upgrading. Also, it'd be handy to know what you've got in your setup now, in order to give a full recommendation--for instance, even if you do get a new Graphics Card, you might be CPU or RAM limited which would make the purchase fairly useless.

That said, i'm also guessing you don't know too much on what's in your PC right now, so i'll let you in on a handy tip; on a windows machine, open the start menu and go to Run (or just type into the search bar if you're on Vista or Win7) "dxdiag" and hit enter. Then you can just provide me with what it says under the System Model, Processor and Memory fields. Also if you go to the display tab and give me the name there, i'll know what current GPU you have.

But, that's all if you're not sure about the whole shindig. If you are, or you *really* just want to get a new Graphics Card, I'd recommend looking at an AMD 6800 or 6900 series card. AMD graphics are very excellent on cost-for-performance, and on the whole are very excellent cards, and the 6800 series is their midrange line.

NVidia I would only recommend in the case that you want an extremely powerful graphics card, but such things really aren't generally necessary.

Hope this wall of text helps.

[Cthulhu]

B... you didn't even give over the top tech specs on anything! For shame. Plus, Sapphire is just a redistributor; they don't make any cards, they just get them from the OEM for a cost, then rebrand and possibly add some after-market alterations, then resell them over to the next set of distributors (ie. shops). Sapphire are pretty a'ight, though.

Now, let a real man handle this one >.>

*ahem*

It's not likely Wayne, but if your current computer is old enough, your motherboard might be spouting an AGP interface, in which case you'll have some serious troubles upgrading. Also, it'd be handy to know what you've got in your setup now, in order to give a full recommendation--for instance, even if you do get a new Graphics Card, you might be CPU or RAM limited which would make the purchase fairly useless.

That said, i'm also guessing you don't know too much on what's in your PC right now, so i'll let you in on a handy tip; on a windows machine, open the start menu and go to Run (or just type into the search bar if you're on Vista or Win7) "dxdiag" and hit enter. Then you can just provide me with what it says under the System Model, Processor and Memory fields. Also if you go to the display tab and give me the name there, i'll know what current GPU you have.

But, that's all if you're not sure about the whole shindig. If you are, or you *really* just want to get a new Graphics Card, I'd recommend looking at an AMD 6800 or 6900 series card. AMD graphics are very excellent on cost-for-performance, and on the whole are very excellent cards, and the 6800 series is their midrange line.

NVidia I would only recommend in the case that you want an extremely powerful graphics card, but such things really aren't generally necessary.

Hope this wall of text helps.

Arch put it very well but I just thought I'd add something in there, You can get an ATI 6770 from XFX and play almost anything...Won't be playing them all on high settings but it'll run it (as long as your CPU and RAM meets the requirements) And these can be had for as little 100 dollars, if that's not too much

[lamarwisneski]

I think you must go for Nvidia geforce gtx 590 it reaches your gaming to higher level that you played before and as i know earlier this month AMD has launched Radeon HD 6990 but nevertheless from both of them Nvidia wins thats I'm suggesting you for Nvidia.

[Archangel]

... provided you have near-on a thousand bucks to spare on only a graphics card. And secondly, the 590 and 6990 are , on average, extremely comparable. Vastly different architectures mean they both excel at different things, but taking a mean average, they're both essentially equivalent in performance.

And those high end cards still have way more power in a GPU than anyone really needs, in my opinion. $1000 for a high-performance graphics card that will be beaten in two year's time by a $200 card.