My PC's New Year resolution: stuff up more

[davidn]

I'd appreciate any graphics card advice!

I'd been doing my best to ignore random occasional lockups on my PC for some time, but as I was shouting at iMovie on Whitney's computer I finally heard a dreaded POST error beep from the other side of the wall. Coming back to a pair of blank monitors, I had to reset and listen to it a couple more times because my internal speaker is quite indistinct - at first I was terrified that it was dash-dot, as that means that the main board has gone, but seeing as my computer appeared to be correctly going through the motions of hard drive activity despite the monitors remaining resolutely blank, I'm pretty certain I'm actually hearing dash-dot-dot, which means it's just the graphics card which has gone on strike. That was definitely the pattern I heard when I listened to it closely after taking the case off.

I ripped it out and ordered a new one online - I trusted my instincts and got the Geforce 9400 GT, but when I suddenly remembered that I had an unbroken record of ordering graphics cards that were completely awful, I immediately got on the phone to cancel it again and seek advice from other people.

I'm not after anything madly expensive or indeed capable - the above card is a budget one at $50 but I'd be prepared to go up to about $100. Around my computer, I generally try to keep the fact that it's the 21st century quiet - I think the most stressful thing I ever ran on it was Portal. I just need something that's PCI Express (I have a 1.x slot but 2.0s are backwards compatible), capable of running two monitors and likely to last.

Any recommendations?

Comments

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

I'll tell you what I went with and what I tell everyone -- the 9800 GT is fairly cheap but pretty powerful. I've heard it roughly compared to the GPU of an Xbox 360, and that seems about right in my experience. Two DVI ports and one HD-capable component port, but you can only use (any) two of them at a time. Goes for about $100 these days, from what I've seen.

[kaedeko.livejournal.com]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130435

[starfishchris.livejournal.com]

I went for the other side - I considered the 9800GT, but over here you can get the Radeon HD 4770 for cheaper, and performance/power consumption is roughly the same. I'm very happy with it since I can now run Team Fortress 2 at full detail & antialiasing at 1600x1050. Hooray for that!