Video cards and RAM.

[Quindiana Jones]

I'm gonna start using my PC for some games. Not massive super awesome 500 games at the same time stuff, but some games. Generally RPGs, but not MMOs.

My RAM is 1.4GB, and my video card is an ATI Radeon Xpress Series (0x5954). Both suck ass balls for gaming, apparently. I'm not looking to spend a lot of money, but I obviously need to upgrade if I want to really get something out of this. Bear in mind, when suggesting things, that I usually work in costs over time. My phone, for example, cost £300. But it won't be overtaken for years, and if it does I can just upgrade the software. So, all in all, it'll end up costing about £30 a year or less. You can see where I'm going with this.

So, yeah. Recommend video cards and tech me up on RAM stuff because I'm kind of oblivious. Why is it important for gaming? Can you just pop in any RAM thing you can buy, or do you need to check compatibility etc? I'm not really sure what the market's like, but I've Googled generic phrases and everything's come up between £200 and £800. That's insane. I don't want to pay more than £100, or £200 for both. Is this overly optimistic?

Cheers, EoFF.

[Jowy]

I think we paid $60 for a decent PCI-E card. If you don't have a PCI-Express slot on your motherboard, you're out of luck unfortunately.

[Namingway]

What motherboard and CPU do you have? Some motherboards and CPUs are only compatible with certain types of RAM and video cards.

[Mirage]

To figure out what sort of RAM you need, you just need to know the mainboard model really. However, your CPU model is very interesting to know if we're going to recommend a video card for you.

You see, a video card is dependent on the CPU being able to feed it data to work on fast enough to work at full capacity. If you put the best video card on the planet on a poor CPU, the video card would be sitting idle waiting for data half of the time. Therefore, it's a better idea to get a video card that is closer to the same "tier" as your CPU.

As for Jowy's comment, it's "mostly" right. The selection of good video cards today mainly use the "PCI express" connection interface, but there are a *few* AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port, PCI-Express' predecessor) cards on the market still. I'm pretty sure the ATI Radeon HD3850 is available with AGP. While the HD3850 is by no means a top of the line card, a system that has got an AGP port might not be able to benefit a lot from a better card than the 3850 anyway.

A HD 3850 should be able to run games like Fallout 3 and Dragon Age well at moderate settings. In fact, in this age of console and PC multireleases, lots of games are able to run ok on old hardware, because consoles are a lot weaker than a high end PC. my one year old Geforce 8800 GT is for example able to run several games at the same or better quality than they run on PS3 or XB360, and that card cost me just 100 bucks when i bought it in the summer of 08.

[Shadowdust]

I'm pretty sure that the fact that it is an ATI Xpress series indicates you'll need a PCI-E card since all of the Xpress onboard video ran off of the PCI-E bus. Also, if it is the Xpress 200 chipset, it supports the old DDR standard. Xpress 1100 and up supports DDR2. Either version of RAM is expensive to upgrade right now though. DDR2 prices shot up to twice what they were a couple of months ago and DDR prices have been just as high if not higher. Either way though if you can list your motherboard or at least the brand and model of your PC, it will make it easy to know what kind of RAM and how much it can support.

When you list the specs of your computer, please list your power supply rating as well. If you are using a PC made by a manufacturer like HP, Dell, etc. you will find that they often use power supplies that are just powerful enough to power the current system. So upgrading a video card can be difficult without knowing how much power your computer can provide.