Nvidia GeForce GT240 or ATI HD5670

[Jura]

Been researching and narrowed it down to these two. I'm a casual gamer and I'm looking for a good card for under $100. Plus low power output.

At first I was leaning towards the HD5570 but from the reviews I've read, even though almost identically to the HD5670, it under-performs it by a noticeable amount but the price difference is very little.

I'm thinking of going with the GT240 even though its not DX11 compatible(?) but I don't think I need that feature soon I guess.

Also the memory on the graphics cards makes it so it uses less system memory right? Or do games use pretty much the same amount of system memory regardless of a graphics card?

[#BROKEN Hasney]

Go for the ATi, even in non-graphics rich DX11 games (of which, ever game coming now is DX11), the performance is noticeable. DX11 graphics are more about performance thatn "oooo, pretty".

More memory will make it use less system memory in theory, but most modern games will take up your RAM no matter how much you have before graphics. More memory on your GFX card is a significant performance boost because the likelyhood is that if your textures can't fit in VRAM, they will be on the swap-file instead of system RAM.

[Mooияakeя™]

I pretty much love NVidia cards. I had a bad deal with a 9800 ATI back in the day, but haven't touched anything since AMD had them up the jaxy.

I got my GTX 260 well cheap almost a year back. It's still going strong. Never had a GFX card fail from Nvidia.

[Jura]

Also would you take more Ram over faster Ram or vice versa? For example 512MB DDR5 or 1GB DDR3?

[#BROKEN Hasney]

On an entry level card, I'd go for more RAM rather than faster. Your bottleneck is going to be on the pipeline, not the speed of loading/unloading RAM.

[Bad Company]

Neither, I'd buy a Radeon 4850 1gb
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814131163R

[Tyguy]

I would look to buy a more powerful used card. Whenever new tech hits the market you have a bunch of guys who put their old stuff on fire sale. Try out the site i'm linking. They have a for sale forum.

www.hardocp.com

[Bad Company]

Or ebay

[Jura]

Went with an XFX Nvidia GT240 512MB GDDR5. Got it for around $80 minus $30 rebate. I just got the rebate check a couple of days ago and need to cash that baby in soon.

I had problems with it at first. My PC would lock up because of it. I uninstalled and reinstalled the driver and it's okay now. For a second I thought I made a mistake and should have went with the HD5670 which is a little better but ultimately I chose the GT240 to mess with Cuda. Ironically I haven't used any programs that utilizes Cuda.

Thanks for everyone who participated in this thread.

[Juan]

Yes

[Jura]

Facking goober.