Vidcard help!!

[chaodck]

Hey Guys!!
I blew up (electronicly speaking) my ATI X1950 vidcard recently, and am now running on the generic Intel one, my motherboard came with. IT SUCKS!!

So, I plan on buying a new one. I don't have the money, nor the hardware (Pentium 4 based motherboard with a free PCIe 2.0 slot, @3GHz, 2GB RAM, just the necesary power source, and heatsink) to go for a great video card, so I was looking for options here in Chile, and narrowed it down to this:

- ATI Radeon HD4650 1024 Mb DDR2.
- ATI Radeon HDG4670 1024 Mb DDR2.
- NVidia GeForce 9500GT 1024 DDR2.
- NVidia GT220 1024 Mb DDR2.

All of those fit into my budget (40k-50k Chilean pesos, roughly around US$75-100), and fit also into my priorities (be able to run newer games, not even near max. capability, but playable).

What do you guys reccomend?? Do you find another alternative at that budget and priorities??

Thanks in advance!!

[Andrew]

I think the 9500GT will get the job done, as you said you'll have to settle for less than maximum but you should still get pretty good performance out of those cards. I've noticed there's a fair few videos on YouTube that compare the performance of cheaper cards with the latest releases, if you're stuck deciding between those four you might want to look up a few videos and see the results for yourself.

[klitzblitz]

I also have a question. I have a PALIT 9800gt 512mb vid card, running 12xx(forgot the last 2) x 800 res on NBA 2k10. While playing my 2nd 20min. game, my monitor is suddenly having hiccups every a minute or so, and after a few minutes, a BSOD occurred.

My question is, where did it go wrong? I'm using speedfan and while playing NBA the vid card temp's on 55'C, while the cores are 54'C. Is that too high?

SPECS
Intel Core 2 Duo E8200
MSI P35A
Palit 9800GT 512mb
4gb 800mhz RAM

[Andrew]

Did you make a note of the error message that came up on the BSOD?

[Patr1ck]

Yes, make a note of the error message including the numbers that show up like this 0x0000000, etc. Then use a search engine and look through the results. You may be able to find out the problem.

[Andrew]

You may need to disable the automatic restart on system failure option so that the error message stays up long enough to be read. In Windows XP, you can find that under the System Properties; go to the Advanced tab, select Startup and Recovery and untick "Automatically restart".

[klitzblitz]

This time, BSOD occured when the game started to play. My OS is Windows 7 64bit

Here's the details:

Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: BlueScreen
OS Version: 6.1.7600.2.0.0.256.1
Locale ID: 13321

Additional information about the problem:
BCCode: 116
BCP1: FFFFFA80050CE4E0
BCP2: FFFFF88004985220
BCP3: 0000000000000000
BCP4: 0000000000000002
OS Version: 6_1_7600
Service Pack: 0_0
Product: 256_1

[Patr1ck]

BCCode: 116
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa469184.aspx
It could be the video card drivers.

[klitzblitz]

Thanks for the info provided! Does that mean I have to reinstall the drivers or look for the lastest version? My installed version is 1.91

[Andrew]

Try reinstalling the driver first if you've got them handy, if that doesn't work then download the latest version. If you do happen to have the most up to date drivers then try rolling back to an older version.

[klitzblitz]

I have now installed NVidia ver. 1.96, the latest one, will update you soon on how will it go.