ASUS V9950 graphics card...

[tropico]

At the moment I've got a Geforce 4 based Asus graphics card, while it works fine with most games, lack of directX 9 support is starting to hurt my gaming experience. So I decided To get myself a new video card. I've always really liked Asus cards so decided to stick with them. After reading Asus's graphics card page, I decided that the best card for me (I've got a $300 dollar limit on my budget but I would also like to buy some RAM) would be the V9950.

From what I can see, it seems like a solid product, but I would love to hear some opinions on both my choice of manufacturer and the video card itself. (maybe someone could come up with a better investment of my money )

Secondly, I bit worried about installing the card myself, I have some experiance with adding a new IDE hard drive, but that was done under supervision. I've never installed any hardware myself. But for me it doesn't seem too hard. Could anyone give me some recommendations on my particular situation?

Thirdly, I am not sure about will this card work on my system. As far as I know it should work as I have a PCI slot that I can free up and my mobo supports AGPx8. Well anyway here is my motherboard (other things don't matter, do they?):

Asus P4PE

I've got a P4 2.2Ghz along with 512 PC2700 DDR RAM

Hope I was clear enough, thanks in advance Vlad!

 

[beedubaya]

That is indeed a good card, but get the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro. Its in the same price range and smokes the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra. My friend has a 9800 Pro and he plays everything including Doom 3 on high resolution and high graphics with absolutely no lag. I assure you that the 9800 products from ATI will not dissapoint you.

 

[chadley]

Hiya

Firstly The fx5900 ultra is a fine card and according to tomshardware guide it beats the radeon 9800pro in most benchmarks although to be honest it's fairly even stevens!

What i will say tho is adding more RAM to your system won't really make a diff performance wise as 512 mb is fine for your system. Also buying more pc2700 RAM is false economy as when u eventually do upgrade your mainboard/cpu you'll want pc3200 atleast so you'll have to fork out again!

Whatever card u choose tho will certainly give u a healthy performance boost right now

I've just installed a MSI Geforce FX5900XT after having a Radeon 9600 and the change over was easy.

First thing to do is download the latest Nvidia or radeon drivers (ignore the ones that come with the card as they will be out of date).
Then go into add/remove programs and remove your nvidia display drivers. After a reboot you should be in the default display option (which is pretty ugly!).
Shut down and remove the power supply.
Open your case and undo the grub screw connecting the card to the case and gently rock your card out (before u touch the card, touch the PSU to un-static yourself).

Install the new card and make sure it sat in the AGP slot nice and tight and screw the grub screw back in.

I don't know about the radeon 9800 but if u go for the 5900 ultra the u will need to connect power to the card (for the fan). I had a spare power connector from my PSU and u will too i expect (it's the same shaped one that connects to the hard drive and dvd etc.
Close case back up and reattatch the power and boot her up!

XP will find ur new card and ask u about installing drivers. Ignore all this and go and find where u downloaded the latest driver and open the file.
This will start the driver installation which will cancel out the add hardware wizard which started when u rebooted.

After alot of screen flicking and mucking about it will finally ask for a reboot.

All you need to do now is to adjust screen resolution etc to whatever suits you.

Thats it!

Enjoy!

 

[tropico]

Thanks for all the help guys! Yeah I will probably go on and buy (and change it myself as well).

Well, thanks again!