Best Budget 3d card to replace geforce 5200

[imashination]

You won't get anything much better than your current card for $100, you'll need to save some more. What cpu do you have?

[Sieb]

search the forum. :)

[Nando3D]

Nvidia 6600.... is very good and Cheap..

[ThePumpkinKing]

You won't get anything much better than your current card for $100, you'll need to save some more. What cpu do you have?

I said 150, but whatever. My card's pretty old, around two years old, and it was not top of the line when it was released. Are you saying that I can't get anything better than it for 150?

----------------------------------------------------------------

I searched the forum, all I could find is, which 3d card is best for blah blah configuration, not budget (oddly enough).
-------------------------------------------------------------
I have a 2.8 gig P4 processor with 512 of RAM.

[ColinRoss]

I also have a Geforce 5200 FX. They are the slowest of the FX range, and the FX range in general just doesn't cut it anymore so I recommend avoiding the whole of the FX series.

The 6600 and 6800 series are the way to go if you want to stick with Nvidia, which is proberly the best idea considering you require a card for 3D work.

This site is UK based, so I don't know how current pricing is going on graphics cards in the states. These may be just a little over your budget, but they are definetly the next recommended step up from a 5200.

www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/copy_of_6600_GT.html (http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/copy_of_6600_GT.html)

Any of the 6600 GT series would do, and by looking at the prices there I would say you can expect to be paying around $180-$200 for the cheapest on that page linked above.


I'm soon going to be upgrading to one of these, as like you said the 5200 is getting on abit nowdays.

Hope that helps ya! :thumbsup:

[ambient-whisper]

doesnt cut it anymore? why not?

i seem to be able to do the exact same work on my fx 5600 that im able to do on a quadro 3000 no problem. its not like for 3d work the new cards got THAT much faster as far as polygon pushing goes. a little better, sure but theres no way in hell that the fx cards "dont cut it"

with the cash you got, id invest maybe in more ram instead.

[ColinRoss]

doesnt cut it anymore? why not?

i seem to be able to do the exact same work that im able to do on a quadro 3000 no problem. its not like for 3d work the new cards got THAT much faster as far as polygon pushing goes. a little better, sure but theres no way in hell that the fx cards "dont cut it"

Personal opinion you could say.

But when the end of this year hits, the FX range will be put in a box and forgotton about as such! So I personally would avoid wasting $100-$130 on a new FX series card, and either buy a 6600 GT now or wait till the end of this year when the prices will drop quite abit anyway.

[ambient-whisper]

yes but considering hes only got 512 ram, a new stick would take him much further than a new card all together ;). he will hit his ram limits way before his card starts to slow down.

[Vertizor]

Newegg has a Leadtek 6600 GT AGP for $149 last I checked. Or just do a search on Newegg with min $1 max $150.

I think the opposing team (ATI) has X700 or X600 if that even exists, for that price range.

[Andyman]

I managed to get ahold of an ATi Radeon 9800 Pro 128mb for around $170. However, it was $230 and only $170 after rebates; but that was a little while ago. I'm sure you could find it cheaper now. I use it for modeling, and it does the job fine. It only starts to slow down after several dozen thousand polys, and only painfully around 90-100k.

Or it might be worthwhile to just get some more RAM or a better CPU. After all, rendering itself doesn't really use your video that much, if at all.

[ThePumpkinKing]

Don't much care about rendering speed. I'm only a teen hobbyist, so I can afford to just leave the computer and come back when it renders a frame I like. I just need to speed up my computer when it comes to have a number of poly's on screen, becuase right now it's too slow. I'll buy more ram if that will help more than a video card, but there is no way I can afford to get a new cpu, especially since the one I have isn't really that slow itself.

[SpeccySteve]

I'd go with more ram first and see if that helps. Even if the card is a bit slow, 512ram is pretty low for 3d these days.

I'd say your cpu is more than adequate for now, wouldn't worry about that.

When you get slowdown, do you notice your app accessing the hard drive at all?

[lots]

So I guess someone is saying my Geforce 4 Ti4600 is not worth it anymore? After all it is older than the FX line of cards :P

In actuality my geforce4 works great for most things. Sure when i have a pretty dense mesh things get slow in Lightwave.. but It has played every game to date at a reliable frame rate (even doom3 and HL2) :) Though its now starting to show some signs of age.. (no more max details in games for me :()

Then again when that K8WE motherboard comes out.. look out world ;P

[billrobertson42]

I'm in a similar situation. I have a P4 2.4GHz HT on a 400MHz Bus I have 1.25 Gig of RAM. The CPU end of it seems o.k. to me for now, but I think the 5200 is a little sluggish at times. The system is an AGP system. Which is about a year and a half old.

I was looking on newegg (as per the earlier advice), and I found a 6600 with 256 Mb of ram and a 6600 GT with 128. Anybody have a feel for what would be better?

Thanks

[-/\-Scott-M-C4D-/\-]

I also have a Geforce 5200 FX. They are the slowest of the FX range, and the FX range in general just doesn't cut it anymore so I recommend avoiding the whole of the FX series.

The 6600 and 6800 series are the way to go if you want to stick with Nvidia, which is proberly the best idea considering you require a card for 3D work.

This site is UK based, so I don't know how current pricing is going on graphics cards in the states. These may be just a little over your budget, but they are definetly the next recommended step up from a 5200.

www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/copy_of_6600_GT.html (http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/copy_of_6600_GT.html)

Any of the 6600 GT series would do, and by looking at the prices there I would say you can expect to be paying around $180-$200 for the cheapest on that page linked above.


I'm soon going to be upgrading to one of these, as like you said the 5200 is getting on abit nowdays.

Hope that helps ya! :thumbsup:

DONT BUY A GRAPHIC CARD FROM OVERCLOCKERS READ THIS .IT'S POSTED ON THE 3D BUZZ WEB SITE NOW http://www.3dbuzz.com/vbforum/showthread.php?t=102245

[ThePumpkinKing]

I'd go with more ram first and see if that helps. Even if the card is a bit slow, 512ram is pretty low for 3d these days.

I'd say your cpu is more than adequate for now, wouldn't worry about that.

When you get slowdown, do you notice your app accessing the hard drive at all?

Thanks for the advice. How do I know/check if the card is accsessing the hard drive?

[lots]

the 6600GT is clocked faster, and I'm willing to bet that its ram is also faster. Hence why it only has 128 (any more and it would be too expensive for the price point). The 6600 non-GT has a slower core clock speed, and its memory isnt as high end.. I guess to put it simply.

More detail: The ram in the 6600GT is GDDR3, which is much faster than the GDDR1 found on the normal 6600. GDDR3 is more expencive for obvious reasons, thus the card makers generally put less to balance the costs, and hit the sub $200 price point.

This is the same kind of ram that is on the 6800 line at a lower clock speed, just for comparison.

[lots]

Thanks for the advice. How do I know/check if the card is accsessing the hard drive?

It's not so much that the card is accessing the hard drive. It is your software that is. When you have a small ammount of ram, windows begins trying to free up ram for more important tasks by putting lower priority programs into the swap space (virtual memory). This is space reserved on the hard drive (by windows) where it will store temprorary data that does not currently fit into the RAM (which is magnitudes faster). When you do not have enough ram, a situation known as thrashing begins. This is when the OS has to access the virtual memory/swap space (on the hard drive). Obviously this will slow down any program trying to run because the HD for one, is terribly slow compared to the ram (about 150 Megabytes/sec as opposed to the 3.2 Gigabytes/sec of ram these days), and two it is busy moving data around to ram and what not trying to allocate enough space for programs to run properly. You would notice when if you're thrashing when your hard drive light blinks alot, or the hard drive is making alot of noise while you are working. But most noticably would be the big drop in performance.

Keep in mind that Windows XP needs alot of ram for its self. It is recommended that the system have at minimum 256 megs of ram. Having 512, means that half of that may be going to Windows alone. 1GB of ram or higher, is definately benificial, especially in this field :)

[ThePumpkinKing]

So the reason my computer chokes on 8000 Subdiv's isn't becuase of the Graphics Card, but the RAM?

[BigJay]

get more ram. you will run into more issues with windows, your music, antivirus, zonealarm, this forum in the background will eat up close to 360-400MBs and leave almost 128MB free for 3D. I agree with the 1GB minimum.

[ambient-whisper]

So the reason my computer chokes on 8000 Subdiv's isn't becuase of the Graphics Card, but the RAM?

nobody here knows for sure what it slowing you down.

reason why i say this is because you arent describing wether the tumbling is slow, or the speed at which you can make edits to your models, or if you have really high rez textures in your viewports...etc.
it could be anything from having way too much history in your model, to having subdivided your model too much, to having too many ngons, or something completely different.

still. 512 ram is nothing. get a minimum of 256 ram more. but i recommend that you get 512.

[ThePumpkinKing]

get more ram. you will run into more issues with windows, your music, antivirus, zonealarm, this forum in the background will eat up close to 360-400MBs and leave almost 128MB free for 3D. I agree with the 1GB minimum.

Okay, I think I will get 512 then.

nobody here knows for sure what it slowing you down.

reason why i say this is because you arent describing wether the tumbling is slow, or the speed at which you can make edits to your models, or if you have really high rez textures in your viewports...etc.
it could be anything from having way too much history in your model, to having subdivided your model too much, to having too many ngons, or something completely different.

still. 512 ram is nothing. get a minimum of 256 ram more. but i recommend that you get 512.[/PHP]

The tumbling and the speed is slow, I don't have highres textures. And it happens even when I load modo's example models, which have little to no N-Gons and (being just loaded from the file) they have no construction history. I think I may just get more RAM instead of a graphics card. How hard will it be to install into a DELL, though? Will it be basically just plug and play, or will I have to go and take the computer hull off?

[ambient-whisper]

The tumbling and the speed is slow, I don't have highres textures. And it happens even when I load modo's example models

those models are using subd x2 by default. if you select all layers for each model, right click and go to properties and then choose 1 for subdivisions instead of 2, you should get a decent speed up. this will reduce the polygons by 4 times.

second, modo isnt exactly what i would consider an application that has been fully optimized for fastest performance. its got decent speed when it comes to tumbling the view, but as far as editing many elements at the same time, its very slow compared to other applications.

( try loading the rhino from modo into silo for example, do one subdivision to the model in each app, and then try an extrude on a row of ten polygons. you will notice that silo gives you much more feedback. )


what i recommend you learn to do is management of meshes. dont ever get under the impression that people who work in games or movies, have 20 high rez models visible at all times during their modelling sessions or when animating ( even though they might have better hardware than you have at the moment). they will do things like referencing, so they can work with really low meshes and only replace them for higher resolution meshes right at the end of the process. and stuff like that.

most modellers dont have their entire models visible when modelling either. we hide what we dont need to see, and only have the main important parts visible. this will make working a lot snappier, and less frustrating.

[ThePumpkinKing]

Okay, thanks then, but I'll still get more RAM, because this kind of thing happens in Lightwave, too.

[CGTalk Moderation]

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.