Hello Everyone
I have a dell inspiron 530 looking to install a graphics card. Have an open PCI express slop 1.0 running a 550 watt power supply. Looking for a card to inprove picture quality for movies mostly, really not into gaming.
Would like to spend about 100.00 or less if possible . Just purchased a 23 inch LCD monitor with HDMI and DVI inputs. Any recomendations would be appreciated
Thanks
Ray
Hello Ray J,
You may want to consider something like an ATi 4670. It's a last generation card, which means it's nice and cheap. It should have no problems running Full HD movies.
If you want something a bit cheaper, you could also consider an ATi 4650.
Hope that helps,
Nahumi
ATi Radeon cards are manufactured by AMD (Advanced Micro Systems), who are the same guys who make AMD CPU's. GeForce is a brand of cards made by NVidia, who tend to specialise only in graphics cards. They do stray into other areas, but they are normally branded as a graphic chip manufacturer.
Most people will try to argue the performance of one brand against the other. In some cases, a particular card or series will beat the other on pure technical grounds, but most of the time it comes down to personal choice. There are a few factors which help people decide who they like the most :
Price : NVidia GeForce cards tend to be more expensive than ATi cards. This is now starting to change, and there usually isn't much between competing ATi and NVidia cards.
Drivers : NVidia tend to release a lot of driver updates. They heavily rely on users to find bugs, which means a lot of driver updates are just bug fixes. ATi tend to do less driver updates, but they tend to include less bugs and more overall feature improvements.
Compatibility : A lot of people decide their graphics card based on other system components. Although unfounded, there is a notion amongst system builders that you should keep chipsets and graphics card manufacturers together. AMD/ATi and NVidia both have motherboard chipsets. Some people also like to pair Intel CPUs with NVidia and AMD CPUs with ATi. In the end, though, it only really matters if you want to take advantage of ATi's Crossfire or NVidia's SLI technologies. In your case, it probably won't matter.
Other than that, there are a few technical differences, which you probably won't notice. Each company prefers a certain way of rendering in 3D, which can result in minor image differences.
I hope that answers your question.
