How do I shop for a video card?Follow

First look at what your computer can support. What kind of slot do you have? If you have a Radeon 9000 series, then it'd be AGP, which will certainly narrow your options down. Second, your power supply can potentially be a limiting factor. Many cards now require an additional power connection, and will consume a fair amount of power. Many consumer desktops from companies like Dell or HP come with very modest power supplies that may not be capable of supporting a power-hungry card. Space may also be a concern, since the further up the product lines you go, often, the cards get physically bigger (to a point) and harder to fit into a case.

Second, to a point, decide what level of performance you need and/or a budget to work with. IE, if you only play a few older games, then you don't exactly need a $700 card, but you'll probably benefit from something in the $100+ range at least.
The size of your monitor can also play into this, since it takes considerably more horsepower to max out settings at 1920x1200 than it does at 1024x768 (as an example).

Model numbers don't tend to tell you that much if you are unfamiliar with the product line. I mean, within a given lineup, usually, the higher the number the better. Often you will have a larger number that denotes the entire series, IE, Radeon HD5000. Then the overall tier, such as HD5400, HD5700, HD5800, etc. Inside those, you'd find individual models, such as the HD5450, HD5750 and HD5770, HD5850 and HD5870. Logically, a 5850 is better than a 5770, which is better than a 5450 (by quite a lot), and so on. However, you're better off doing some research to get a general idea of the type of performance that the models give.

In terms of specs, there are usually two big ones that will vary. The actual GPU, which is typically denoted by the model number, and the amount of memory the card has. Most of the time a given GPU will have maybe a couple memory configurations, IE, 512MB or 1GB.
Secondary to that would be how fast those items are clocked, and for some cards (usually more on the low end), the type of memory used (and possibly in turn the memory bus width).

90% of the time, the clock speeds will be pretty much the same for the same model card from different companies. The rest of the time, you may have models that run slightly over, or slightly under the reference design.
If you are looking at a low end card, for one reason or another, and there are variations on the memory, for example, models with DDR2 memory and DDR3, then the higher ranked memory cards will often be notably better, albeit a little more expensive.

Most of the time though, you'll combine what you can put in your computer + budget, and narrow things down to a handful of cards. The individual features/specs of a particular model line might come into play at that point, but for gaming, usually it's just a matter of finding what card performs the best unless you have a very specific want/need for another factor.

Here is a buyer's guide that has some picks per price point. At the very least, the hierarchy chart at the end can give you a general idea of where a given card stands.

So $250 or so at newegg/tigerdirect = fairly good?

I can blow about about $300 total, but this is a bought computer, and I'm pretty sure I'm already taxing my power supply as it is, so I'll need to upgrade that too.

On a side note, will asking too much out of my power supply diminish the performance of my card, or just shut my computer down?

If you exceed your power supply rating, keeping in mind that many power supplies have a small hidden reserve, your computer will simply not power up. anything under a 525 watt needs replacing before you attempt to run a newer video card. 525 is likely pushing the envelope, but might work. 600 watt will work if you have minimal additional hardware (drives, fans, etc) 650 is about the low end of the safe bet. I'd try looking for a high efficiency 700 watt.

http://cgi.ebay.com/PNY-Nvidia-GeForce-GTX-470-1280MB-GDDR5-Graphics-Card-/300420600949?cmd=ViewItem&pt=PCC_Video_TV_Cards&hash=item45f2769475

This good if it's still cheap in a day?

Ended up going with a 285 for about $250 and a 600W supply for about $35.

Thanks for all your help, everyone, and wish me luck with the ebay situation.

That went well. I broke my hard drive (not sure how badly). The power supply only had one SATA dongly (my fault for not checking). And the card might not fit.

In regards to the hard drive, do I need to have it in SATA1 on the mobo if it's the system drive?

Well, glad I didn't scrap the old PC for parts.

If the hard drive is toast, I'm dreading to see how much microsoft wants to soak me for 7.

Edited, May 2nd 2010 6:31am by Lubriderm

The cables are what I'm worried about. I broke the little piece of plastic that more or less provides the compression needed keep the cables secured. I might just bring to my local computer fixin' people (***** the geek squad), and see if they can either fix it or at least transfer the stuff to another drive. If the price is right, I may just have them do the whole GPU install too. I have shaky hands that run it the family, and it's not conducive to computer building, I guess.

You broke the sata connector? Ouch. That isn't good. You are most likely incredably screwed now if you needed any data on that drive. If you can find someone with the skills they might be able to do something tricky with a USB to sata connector, or worst case scenario, solder on the leads, but your chances of that are low. I've done the latter, it is not fun.

That's what electrical tape is for.

a 32 bit operating system can read a 64 bit drive just fine. 64 bit programs are only different in that they run on the other half of the CPU not available to 32 bit. The data will be accessable to whatever OS you plug it into

If you do data transfer from ahrd drives more than once in a while, these come in handy:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817153071&cm_re=sata_drive_dock-_-17-153-071-_-Product
(example, plenty of other units and price options)