Graphics card question...

[Green_Lantern]

I need a better video card on my computer and was told to buy an XFX Gforce 240 GT 1 gb card. Would a Galaxy Geforce 240 GT or another brand work too?

Does the brand make any difference? Other brands cost less than XFX.

[canetoad]

1. Brand shouldn't make a difference

in the performance of the card but having said that, I've had a couple of cheaper brands die long before their time.

Graphics cards are generally either Radeon or Nvidia. The 240GT is a Nvidia chipset card. Many manufacturers make cards of each type ie, Gigabyte, Sparkle, Galaxy, MSI and so on.

Nvidia cards, in order of power (and price) are GS series, then GT, GTS, GTX being the best and very expensive. Galaxy is a pretty reliable card and you should be happy with it.

[RoyGBiv]

3. Caveat ...

Brand doesn't in and of itself make a difference, but some of the low-end brands hide weaknesses of their offered cards behind marketing.

For example, you'll often find NVidia 240GT cards from low-end manufacturers with lower clock speeds or lower memory. The chipset is the same as the NVidia brand, but essential elements of it are not.

Hate to say it, but you can usually discern this by price. The ~$50 cards and the ~#100 cards may have similar labeling, but there's going to be major differences in the way they are constructed that will lead to variances in performance.

Also, there are things like fans or heatsinks. Some 240GT cards have fans while others have only heatsinks. The latter are noise-free. The former tend to run cooler. Is this an issue for you and your case? If you have one of those really tight cases from HP or some other manufacturer, it might be.

That said, any 240GT chipset card, regardless of the details, is going to be vastly better than high end cards of 2-3 years ago.

[EOTE]

4. Vastly better?

I have a high end card from 2-3 years ago. It's a GTX280 that I bought a little more than 2 years back. The GT240 has a small fraction the power of the GTX series. GPUs don't advance that quickly. It usually takes about 4 or so years for budget cards to match the performance of flagship cards.

[RoyGBiv]

5. Well, maybe my timing is off ...

I lose track of when things were at the high end.

I'm actually thinking of my old card, which high end when I bought it. But, I guess that was actually more like 5 years ago.

The point was simply that the 240 isn't going to suck.

[EOTE]

6. It certainly won't suck.

But then again, try getting it to play a 3 year old game like Crysis at a decent resolution. Even TODAY'S high end cards struggle with that game. The GT240 would be mostly for low to mid resolution gaming, unless it's either a very efficiently coded game or it's rather old.

[RoyGBiv]

7. Well, there's that ...

Crysis is an aberration, I think. As you say, even today's cards have trouble with it. It requires so much horsepower, you basically have a build a system just for it.

I play quite a few recent games, and none of them require that kind of juice even though I run them under Wine or, when available, a native Linux client working with graphics drivers that remain inferior to their Windows counterparts.

Crysis is just waaaaay out there. Very pretty, but damn.

[Occulus]

2. What canetoad said, and also

you should take a look at your motherboard and see if it has an nForce chip on it. If it does, you may get more stability (and possibly a feature or two) if you stick with an nVidia chipset card than if you switch to an ATI chipset card.

Generally speaking, the brand doesn't matter all that much. I myself have had great success with the PNY brand. Check TigerDirect or Newegg for pricing deals.