Posted

Apr 4th 2007

Mood

Enthusiastic

Music

Bump of Chicken - Karma

Why.......;_;

One day [today] I'm like HEY LETS GO TO SHEEZYART and then I'm like WHOA LETS UPDATE THIS CRAP AND GET ACTIVE AGAIN.

Well the "GET ACTIVE AGAIN" part will have to wait.

It seems that my video card is starting to die (at first I thought it was a monitor issue but it works flawlessly hooked up to my Mom's computer) because it started to get fuzzy and hard to see. But now when I play games like Trickster or Guild Wars, the graphics start flickering like crazy at random intervals and some parts fail to even render at times.

I've unininstalled then reinstalled drivers, put it into another machine (to see if there are driver conflicts?) and even reinstalled the games. No luck. Sometimes the fan even stops working. So I guess I'm going to have to get a new video card because I don't want to go through onboard video ever again.

I have my eyes on a PCI-Express card but that requires me to buy (yet another) motherboard since this one is AGP (upgrading motherboards with limited money is not a good idea). I found a good motherboard for $50 supporting my socket (754) and even has a PCI-Express x16 slot.

So I am set at EVGA. My question is this:

Should I stick with my 350W power supply and get a 7600GT or should I upgrade my power supply and get a 7900GS?

The 7600GT is currently a good deal @ $112. <-- LINK

While the 7900GS is currently at ~$150 <-- LINK

Getting the 7900GS (which is $150 @ newegg.com) would require a new power supply (they ask to get a minimum 400w while mine is 350w). And I know I don't want to tempt screwing my video card up trying it with 350w~ Which would indeed bump the price a bit more than I can afford.

I want to try and get my computer back up and running w/ gaming as soon as I can. But if the 7600GS isn't really worth it then I will work to get the 7900GS instead.

If it helps I have an AMD Sempron 3100+ (Clocked @ 1.8ghz, read this <-- LINK) and 1gb of RAM (in 2x512mb DDR400 184pin). Also I use onboard sound since I gave my soundcard to a friend and I needed room for a promise card.

*phew*

Any insight would be great, thanks~~

[/end long entry]

EDIT: SheezyArt still hasn't fixed the way links used to be underlined ;_;

EDIT2: If anyone wants to know I had the evil bastard of a card: NVIDIA GEFORCE FX5200. So anything is an upgrade; however, I want something that will play most modern games at decent speeds (as well as mess with vista if I wanted to ).

EDIT 3: I linked to the wrong card, it was actually the 7600GT @ $130~ which is still within my price range. Fixed.