An upgrade to my Nvidia GeForce 8600GT?

[Dhakos]

Hey, I'm looking to upgrade my graphics card, unfortunately while I know that better ram and clock speed will boost performance, I'm having trouble putting that to physical cards to put together upgrade options.

I much prefer Nvidia and would prefer to stick with them, my budget would be around £60-£80, can anyone suggest me an upgrade? reasons why would also be a massive help, thanks a lot

 

[Dhakos]

Oh, it needs to have 2 monitor ports, currently mine are both DVI, other than that, I don't need any other ports, hdmi or anything, just the monitors

 

[Arris]

Personally I'd push the boat out and get a GTX 460 or HD5850 card for £100-£120.

Anandtech have a nice tool for comparing benchmarks for different cards. Here is one between 8800 GT and GTX 460 to give you an idea of what kind of performance boost you'd see.

Not sure exactly how the 8600 GT stacks up but the sub £100 cards like the GTS 450 only seem to offer about 10-20 fps more than your existing card in the benchmark results they have for both card. Hence why I'd try to get a GTX460/HD5850 card at least

What resolution do you play at? Some lower priced cards can sometimes offer reasonable performance at lower resolutions.

 

[yRaz]

I have been looking at the HD 6850 (~$180) and the GTX 550ti (~$150) very seriously. I have an 8800GT that needs replaced and it seems both of those cards blow it out of the water. I'm not sure if either of them have 2 DVI ports(I think the 550ti may) but adapters are easy to come by and they might even come with the ones you need. If they don't then you will want to look at the packing list to see if they come with it.

 

[Dhakos]

I play at 1680x1050 usually because thats the native resolution of my screen, and wow I like those benchmark results, I'll have a look into that card

 

[Arris]

I play at 1680x1050 usually because thats the native resolution of my screen, and wow I like those benchmark results, I'll have a look into that card

Do some research, check around for deals/rebate offers. I really would advise trying to get at least a GTX460 card, some might suggest a lower card but for £20 over your budget you get a lot more bang for your buck...

Check out the bench of GTS 450 vs GTX 460
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/316?vs=313

Quite a difference

 

[Dhakos]

Thanks a lot for the help I'll have to get researching
Last thing though, whould it be possible to have a list of card brackets? for example, 8000-9000 GT are good, 300-600 GTX are even better etc, because with all the numbers I can't work out whats better. I thought that a 9500 GT would kick my 8600 GT, but it turns out its actually worse.

 

[Arris]

Another resource I use for refining my possible choices for graphic card purchase is tomshardware.

Check out this graph of combined fps scores for a whole bunch of games at 1680x1050.

You can always have a look and see if they have benchmarks of the specific titles you enjoy playing to see what does best. Some titles favor Nvidia cards, others AMD/ATI. I agree it gets confusing with model numbers, even more so when its things like 5870 vs 6850, higher number isn't always better. The charts are a good start, and if you get your choices down to a few cards just post back with which ones you are considering, even different brands of the same model and we'll post our opinions and recommendations