Suggest a graphics card

[JDArt]

Obviously my graphics card is the weak part of my system. Can anyone suggest a graphics card that will make my PC feel snappy? I don't do games, but I do value fast 2D performance.

Thanks.

[JDArt]

Ideally I'd like to find a fanless graphics card.

[TheRileyFactor]

Damn, you got some high scores there, brother! What processor and RAM do you have?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814125258
This card is fanless, and I have a friend with the 4850 and 1GB GDDR5 and gets great framerates and a 5.9 rating, although this card has GDDR3 memory, so its memory is a tad slower. Getting high ratings without a fan is tough unless you go water-cooling. If you OK the fan, then there are tons of options out there. The new NVidia 295 chipset is about the best you can get (2 GPUs, 2gb memory, crazy fast, crazy expensive)... I have the ATI HD4670 chipset with 1GB GDDR3 memory, and I am very well pleased. I can run Crysis at 1920x1080 on High settings with 60+ fps, and completely maxed out at 1280x1024 at around 45 fps... You can also always buy any card and take off its fan and heatsink and replace it with a massive heatsink and just keep an eye on temperature under heavy use for a while to make sure its within the tolerable range....

Just my $0.00002


-Daniel

[TheRileyFactor]

Looking at your scores again... Yours says components are rated on a scale of 1-7.9.... maybe I need to re-run my tests... Last time I ran them everything was at 5.9, but it said it was on a scale of 1-5.9... guess they recently bumped up the scale? I'll have to check it out when Iget home from work tomorrow morning...

[felix.reichardt]

JD with such ratings your system should feel snappy. If you do not game keep your money your graphics card shud be fine (5.9 rating).

[TheRileyFactor]

I do have to agree with Felix on this one... if you're not feeling the bottleneck, then why go for the upgrade just yet? I would say at most look for a card with 1gb or more of GDDR3 or better memory. For fast 2D performance, about any of the newish chipsets will do great. No need to spend $500 on a graphics card with great 3D gaming performance if you never use it for such! You'll also need to consider your powersupply if you get too crazy with your video card as well!

For 2D performance, you'll probably feel a great difference with more RAM, but then again, I don't know how much you already have, or if you're running 64-bit Win7... If you're in 32-bit version, then anything over about 3gigs is wasted...

[JDArt]

Originally Posted by TheRileyFactor

Looking at your scores again... Yours says components are rated on a scale of 1-7.9.... maybe I need to re-run my tests... Last time I ran them everything was at 5.9, but it said it was on a scale of 1-5.9... guess they recently bumped up the scale? I'll have to check it out when Iget home from work tomorrow morning...

I'm using Windows 7. New ratings go to 7.9.

[edk]

Hi JDArt, there's an old saying in IT, RAM, RAM and more RAM. If your OS is 64 bit, throw in as much RAM as you system can physically take. Having a great graphics card is one thing, but always, data flows through RAM and CPU first, the bigger the processor and the more RAM you have, the faster your PC will run. The other potential bottleneck to good performance is is your HDD. If you are willing to pay hundreds for a new graphics card, I would suggest to upgrading your PC to at least 2 HDD's of exactly the same spec, and striping them. Given the size of the files Photoshop produces on disk, as well as the amount of data moved in RAM, getting the data of your HDD's as fast as possible will let your CPU and RAM work far more effectively. Simply put, the faster you can get your data from the hard drive to RAM and the CPU the better.

[swampler]

Originally Posted by edk

I would suggest to upgrading your PC to at least 2 HDD's of exactly the same spec, and striping them.

And this would also double your chances of losing data. If either of the 2 drives go out, you lose everything. Ideally you'd get 4 and do a stripe and backup RAID configuration instead. Or else, have a really good backup system if you stripe just the 2 drives.

[edk]

Originally Posted by swampler

And this would also double your chances of losing data.

no doubt a backup solution should be in place for any system where data integrity is an issue, but as for doubling your chances of losing data? no. on a single drive system if your drive fails it fails, you lose data. on a system with 2 drives, if one drive fails, you lose data; no doubling of chances. I suggested a stripe simply as way of highlighting a better way of improving data read write performance. If you really wanted to go all the way you would use a raid 10 or a raid 5 mirrored! But that is going too far I think for this query.

JDArt; Without doubt, use a backup solution, regardless of what you choose to do. Just remember, the faster you move data, the better your performance will be.

[felix.reichardt]

Originally Posted by edk

no doubt a backup solution should be in place for any system where data integrity is an issue, but as for doubling your chances of losing data? no. on a single drive system if your drive fails it fails, you lose data. on a system with 2 drives, if one drive fails, you lose data; no doubling of chances. I suggested a stripe simply as way of highlighting a better way of improving data read write performance. If you really wanted to go all the way you would use a raid 10 or a raid 5 mirrored! But that is going too far I think for this query.

JDArt; Without doubt, use a backup solution, regardless of what you choose to do. Just remember, the faster you move data, the better your performance will be.

deleted my comment coz I was wrong I thought stripped drives do not increase perfomance that much in reality but they obviously do.

[felix.reichardt]

I have a quadcore with 4 GB ram and a NVIDIA 8800 graphics and am getting this rating under 64-bit Win7. I think the 8800 is still an excellent graphics card. It needs its own power sypply though and has a fan but really quiet. You might get one cheap now since they have newer cards out.

[swampler]

Originally Posted by edk

as for doubling your chances of losing data? no.

Actually, yes. If your 2 identical drives have a 1 in a 100 chance of going bad, the odds of either of the 2 going bad is 2 in a 100. And since the data is striped, if EITHER drive goes out, you lose everything.

[TheRileyFactor]

Originally Posted by swampler

Actually, yes. If your 2 identical drives have a 1 in a 100 chance of going bad, the odds of either of the 2 going bad is 2 in a 100. And since the data is striped, if EITHER drive goes out, you lose everything.

Striping is dangerous for critical data... so get two 74gb 10000rpm WD Velociraptor HDDs, stripe them and just load programs on them. Then get two 1TB drives, put them in RAID and use that for storage.