OT: Graphics card for gaming

[John]

My 83-year old neighbour likes to play games such as Civilisation 4 and Football Manager 2008, 2009 and 2010 (I think that's what he said anyway - I'm not into games).

He has a tower unit based on a Gigabyte GA-VM900M motherboard, which is a Socket 775 (LGA775) board, and I think it has an Intel Core 2 Duo processor in it.

His nephew told him that his games would look and perform much better if he had a better graphics card, rather than the integrated graphics. I've been trying to help him decide what to get but, not being a gamer myself, it's such a bloody bewildering minefield of choices that my head hurts!!

He hasn't got a great deal of money so a new machine is out of the question, but he doesn't need it anyway as he won't be going for the latest, greatest games, just the ones I mentioned above.

There's a PCI-e x16 slot on the board and someone suggested that the best card that motherboard would take would be an AMD Radeon HD6870. There's a few on Ebay, such as this one

secondhand for anywhere around £40 to £60, which is acceptable to him. However, whilst looking on there, I came across this card and wondered if this, being new and therefore newer technology, would be better?

I don't want him to spend more money than necessary but I want him to be able to play his games better than he can now, but this really is not my area of expertise, so any help would be gratefully received.

[GB]

That has Chrome9 HC? IGP integrated graphics in it. Passmark G3D is 111.

That's a very power-hungry card. 150w. So, you'll need to check out his PSU. The passmark of that card is 2830, so it's vastly better for 3d gaming than the inbuilt graphics.

The question is whether it's overkill? I'm pretty certain that it is, and if you factor in the cost of a new PSU it's an expensive solution.

I think you should have a look at the PSU and see what that will take, rather than the motherboard, as a new PSU suitable for a gaming card is around £50.

This website list reqs for FM 2010, eg NVidia FX 5900 Ultra or better. That's a card with a passmark of only 240. Although it does say "or better", I don't think you need to get vastly better, like the HD6870.

That's passmark 350 or so.

It's also low profile, which tends to cost more, and he doesn't need that in a tower case.

[GB]

How about something like item 381530682130 on ebay? CCL are a well-known computer shop.

Says it needs a 300w PSU, but as far as I can see the power used is only

20-30w.

[Andy Burns]

The card will presumably only reach that score in a PCIe 2.0 machine, which the motherboard is not, in fact the card says is is downward compatible to PCIe 1.1, the motherboard doesn't say if it's 1.0 or 1.1, so at worst it won't work.

Will the games he's running make use of a higher spec card? I've not played games for so long I can't answer that, but personally I wouldn't put money into such an old PC.

[michael adams]

I'm not trying to be clever, (as if) but if it's only the opinion of the nephew rather than that of the 83 year old neighbour himself, that he needs a new graphics card, then why isn't it the nephew who's making the recommendations and fitting the card ?

It's probably a bit late now, but maybe its the nephew who need sorting out, rather than the graphics card. This nephew doesn't also make use of the computer by any chance, does he ?

michael adams

...

[The Natural Philosopher]

I've direct experience of two. A Nvidia 210, and an Nvidia 720. the 210 was around £20 and gave about 10x faster graphics, the 7200 is around £45 and runs cooler and gives about 30x faster graphics

In terms of anything but games the cards barely make any difference, unless you find full screen flash videos to be 'choppy'

[The Natural Philosopher]

depends on the OS.

Games tend to write to Direct-X or summat, and if the car has drivers for that they will provide the same interface to the software

[Andy Burns]

What O/S is he running? Too new a card may not support older O/S

[John]

Windows 7 Home Premium if I remember correctly.

[John]

michael adams presented the following explanation :

Nephew lives about 250 miles away on was just on a weekend visit.

[John]

It's Windows 7 and he reckons that 50 or 60 quid is a better solution at the moment than a couple of hundred at least for a new machine.

[John]

GB explained on 18/06/2016 :

Thanks very much GB, that looks interesting - says he who knows nothing about them lol

[Andy Burns]

That shouldn't rule out any of the cards mentioned, I envisaged XP or Vista.

[michael adams]

Well possibly he should have been more specific. From my reading of this the 83 year old neighbour was perfectly happy with what he had, until the nephew decided he shouldn't be. In which case it's down to the nephew to put things right on his next visit. Not shelve the responsibility onto somebody else.

Basically there's a lot of this going on. People deciding what's best for other people, often old people, when in many cases they're either perfectly happy with what they've already got, or any "improvement" would represent too great a learning curve.

At least so far nobody has suggested he should install Linux.

michael adams

...

[John Rumm]

I was going to suggest something similar. GT710 is lots of bang for your buck, and often available with passive cooling (i.e. a nice reliable heatsink, rather than a noisy fan to go wrong at some point in the future).

Its not going to be worth pushing to boat out too far on the machine as currently specced since it does not have the CPU oomph to play anything particularly challenging.

[John Rumm]

Without knowing more specifics its hard to be sure... I have seen cases where someone says "look at this great game I have got, its really good" you then watch them struggle to interact with something that is throwing out five frames a second, and is a laggy as hell. I then tweak the default video settings for the game down to their minimum, and all of a sudden its orders of magnitude more playable. A 20 - 30 quid GPU can make a massive difference in those cases.

[Bill Wright]

They all say that. He'll have plenty.

Bill

[The Natural Philosopher]

Yep. 710 looks even better than the 720 for less folding.

Go for it.

[The Natural Philosopher]

That is basically where I jumped on the 'i need a better card' wagon.

3FPS was unplayable, £20 later it was 30fps.

And flash video went from 'jerky' to 'smooth'

[John]

John wrote on 18/06/2016 :

Thanks for all your help guys. I went to see him and between us, and you, we've decided on the GT710. Thanks again folks, couldn't have done it without you all.