Another piece of kit that I personally own is this here HD 5750, and is what I currently use for my gaming. It seems to be more popular than the 4870, the GTX 285 and 295, and I think I might know why. Because it's only $130 Bucks at Newegg right now. That's right. You get a Card capable of running Crysis at 1680X1050, with all settings on high and most on Very High, at a consistent 25-30 Frames per second for $130. And that's speaking from personal experience. The GTX 295 is about $450-600 Price range right now so you definitely get your money's worth here.
Some of the tech specs are fairly standard now days, PCI Express 2.1, Core clock of 700mhz, Memory clock of 1150mhz, It has a Gig of DDR5 Memory on it, Supports DX11, It's got just about everything you could want on a video card really, and the thing to remember is it's dirt cheap for what you get. Team Fortress 2? 1680X1050, 16X AA and everything maxxed out will nab about 130 Frames per second (Unless you have Vsync on) I have a Quad 3.2ghz with 4 Gigs of Ram which isn't shabby either, but this PC could barely run Team Fortress 2 with it's Onboard video card with everything off and at a low resolution until I popped this baby in.
Now I hear you asking but why did you even attempt gaming without a video card? Well I had to RMA My first one. Got it done for free no problem and fairly quick. The problem was artifacting that got progressively worse over the course of a week, although performance was perfect, the artifacting was annoying and then it got out of hand, so I sent it back. Got my new one, Popped it in, PERFECT, although the same artifacting appears from time to time but only on surface edges and doesn't get any worse than that. So my gripe is with Powercolor. There are plenty of people that make the HD 5750 aside form Powercolor. Diamond, Saphire, HIS, VisionTek, ASUS, Gigabyte. I don't know if they're any better or worse but Just based on my personal experience (A whole 2 cards from Powercolor) I would try and get one from one of the other manufacturers instead. And if you're wondering what the artifacting looked like, Just one pixel white dots, The first card flickered all over certain surfaces (Such as A character in Dragon Age) But the geometry and buildings and such had no artifacting at all. And with my second one here, same concept of where it appears, only it doesn't flicker and it's only on SOME model edges that I only notice if I'm looking for it. And we're talking just 3 or 4 pixels total and it's kind of rare to even see anyway, hence I've kept it
Now as for performance I've had with it, I couldn't ask for better performance from any card really. What's the difference between 60 Frames per second and 160 from another card? A couple hundred dollars. Sure that more powerful card, if you buy it now, will probably run things that this one won't, in the future, But by then that card will be a couple hundred dollars cheaper. This thing is running Crysis, Far Cry 2, Dragon Age, Team Fortress 2, Shattered Horizon (Beautiful game By the way), Empire Total War, Splinter Cell Conviction, and my list goes on, Perfectly. And if you play games like Guild Wars or World of Warcraft (Games an X1650 Pro could run) You aren't going to be disappointed either. This thing runs Battlefield Bad Company 2 like a charm, it's run the new Medal of Honor Beta absolutely perfectly. Not only does it run smooth it has a Fan the size of a dinner plate on it keeping things cool. The hottest I've had it is 80c while playing Borderlands, but for the most part it stays in the lower 70c range.
If you need a video card and you don't want to sell your kidney then this one is the one to get as far as I'm concerned. It runs great, it runs cool, It's near Flawless as far as performance goes. Just be wary on who you're getting it from, like I said If I had the option I'd opt out on Powercolor and go with almost any other manufacturer. While the specs are slightly different, it's basically the same Beast. You get a Nissan Skyline R34 for the price of a Prius
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