GForce Card Suggestions

I need some help from the forums. Right now I have a pretty nice rig, an Alienware computer, I-7 core, 16 gigs of memory, Windows 7, all the bells and whistles. The one thing that I am behind on is my graphics card. Right now I am running an old GTX 260 card with 1280mgs. I want to upgrade to something that is much better. I tried buying a Geforce GT 520 with 2 gigs of memory, but it was actually much slower than my current card. Can somebody give me some suggestions? I'm looking to spend about $200 on something that is better. Any advise you can give me would be helpful!!!

The 520 sucks..... memory has barely any effect on performance unless you purchase an HD 6950 or so--a card powerful enough to actually push our more than 1GB on textures.

For around $200, get this is you want to go Nvidia: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6814125401

Hey good sir, Yes the GTX 560 ti is SLI ready. But i don't recommend Gigabyte even tho thats the cheapest 560 ti. I would get ASUS or EVGA. i and running the ASUS one in SLI and havnt had any issue at all. Get the Cheapest EVGA one, they have lifetime warranty. Hope your mobo supports SLI!

Gigabyte is pretty decent IMO, and that cooler is good. EVGA is better, but also pricier. I wasn't sure how far past $200 you were willing to go.

And AMD GPU's don't just automatically work better with AMD CPU's. Best combo you can get right now is an AMD GPU with an Intel CPU.

I thought that too, but now 3 years into my 4xxx XFX Lifetime warranty card I'm about to go buy a 6850 so the Lifetime Warranty never really did anything for me.

Oh, and most warranties won't cover you if you OC. I'm not sure about EVGA tho. They are pretty enthusiast oriented. I have an EVGA Geforce 6200 in a super old computer since the integrated graphics back then was terrible, but that's my only experience with them.

Yeah if you have 2 builds like you do, lifetime warranties can be very handy. I definitely see their purpose, but personally I only really need a 3 year Manufacturer Warranty for myself.

If you have the cash to buy the EVGA though, do it. They are far and away the best card maker out there IMO

Just because the first number is bigger and newer, doesn't mean better. The one to look at is the 2nd number in Nvidia cards. x2x cards = crap

A 260 has 192 stream processing cores. A 520 has 48. Even worse though, is the 520 only has 4 ROP's while the 260 has 28. Basically, the 520 can't push near the amount of pixels the 260 can. Not to mention the bandwidth differences, but I'm tired and don't want to get into detail.

That was a simplified way of comparing them, in reality you can't really compare cards from different generations just by looking at the stream cores but you can get a general idea from it.

Here is a tool that mat help also. http://www.geforce.com/Optimize

You can use this chart to see what the equivalent AMD card would be. http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 107-7.html

Ti version is always better. With a few rare exceptions, 2gb cards have proved a waste of money. That is until we get more games that properly take advantage.

Well, I do run dual displays, but not at those resolutions, they are only 23". Guess I will go with the GTX 560 TI.

EVGA covers overclocking you're also still under warranty if you fit an aftermarket cooler on if you so wish.

EVGA would be my first choice if I was going for a reference design.