| Mr Puggsly said: The other day I actually bought a video card for my computer. I'm also running a Pentium 4 with 1GB of RAM. I bought the BFG 9800 GT. It runs about $130. I didn't want to spend too much, just looking to do some PC gaming. So far I tested CoD4, Unreal Tournament 3, Left 4 Dead 1 and 2, Lost Planet, Dirt, Bioshock, and Zeno Clash. All of them are playable on high settings, but some I put on medium settings. Perhaps you can play newer games if you buy a $200+ card. |
You should take it back, because you got ripped off.
Click on this link. It's a comparison of high-end graphics cards using a synthetic benchmark. I've highlighted the card that you bought. Now look upward several inches until you see, "Radeon HD 4850." You'll see that the 4850 has about a 33% performance increase over your 9800 GT. Well, it's also only $100. And furthermore, you overpaid for a 9800 GT in the first place.
Seriously though, if you're running a P4 with 1 GB RAM, you'll be bottlenecked by your CPU and RAM long before your video card. (Not to mention something like your hard drive, which - even if you got a WD Raptor or something back in 2005 - will be slow as molasses compared to a modern $50ish HDD.) If you have the money, you really should build a new system.
"'Casual games' are something the 'Game Industry' invented to explain away the Wii success instead of actually listening or looking at what Nintendo did. There is no 'casual strategy' from Nintendo. 'Accessible strategy', yes, but ‘casual gamers’ is just the 'Game Industry''s polite way of saying what they feel: 'retarded gamers'."
-Sean Malstrom
