Need new video card.

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I need to upgrade my video card. Windows doesn't like my current NVidia Card because it isn't 'signed'.

I would like to know what I can get for under USA$250 that is Windows Pro friendly and good for games.

 

The signed hardware driver problem is just a driver problem. Get valid signed drivers from nVidia and that should be fixed.

 

Wow...that's a loaded question without any of the details. (i.e. what kind of game do you play and what kind of interface do you have (either AGP or PCI Express)).

I'm guessing that you have a motherboard with AGP, so for under $200, you could get a nice ATI X1600 Pro with 512MB or RAM. On the nVidia side of things, it looks like you can get a 7600GS with 256MB of RAM for around $250 or less.

To be honest, I've been so busy with school that I haven't been able to keep up with the current video cards.

As for you "not signed" issue, download do as Taza suggests and download the latest drivers from nVidia's website and your problem should go away.

 

Does it not work, or does Windows just get pissed off and tell you it doesn't like your unsigned driver. If it just doesn't like it, tell it to shut up and install it anyways.

As for a new one, we would definitely need more info as Kitrax says. I have just recently done alot of research on video cards as I am planning on buying a new PC soon, and it is quite a lot of info to look into which makes it not a simple question to answer.

 

For around US$200 I've heard good things about the nVIDIA 7900GS - its the slow version of the 7900 and it has a similar cost to most low-mid range cards but better performance. It's also very overclockable.

To really over-simplify the whole gpu thingy


.....................nVIDIA.......ATI

Gen before.....low.......5200.......9200
last..............mid.......5600.......9600
....................high......5700.......9800
Notes: ATI gets the speed crown. 9800>5700, 9600>5600 (slightly)

Last..............low.......6200.......X300
Generation.....mid.......6600.......X700
...................high......6800.......X800
Notes: nVIDIA probably does better here. 6600>X700, X800 is slightly faster than the 6800 but costs heaps more. As a comparison an nVIDIA 6600 runs slightly slower than a 9800 (see last gen) in older games, but slightly faster than newer ones.

Current.....low.......7300.......X1300
Generation..mid.......7600.......X1600
.............high......7800.......X1800
..............v.high....7900.......X1950
Notes: 7600 roughly comparable with 6800 - faster in newer games, slower in older ones. Pretty close performance wise between ATI and nVIDIA. There isn't a very big change in archiatecture so the performance leap wasn't as great as what was seen in the previous generation.
I would probably go some version of an nVIDIA 7900 if I were to build a comp atm, but Intel Core 2 Duo's tend to work better with crossfire (2 ATI cards in the same computer) than with SLI (2 nVIDIA cards in the same computer).

Next........high.......8800.......TBA*
Generation
* - X2800 at a guess
Notes: Supports DirectX 10


Suffixes
NVIDIA - SE/GS - slow edition
................GT/GTO/GTs- regular sort edition
................GTX - fast edition
GX2 - 2 cores on one card (very expensive and very fast)


ATI
................XT - fast edition
................XTX - faster edition
................PRO - everything else
................50 in place of the 00 - newer and faster than the vanilla version (generally comes out 1/2 a generation cycle later (around 9 months, probably less). Usually results in slightly fast speeds but nothing too huge - just enough to edge it infront of the competition.

Also the speed differences indicated by the suffixes are generally less than by the numbers

[ December 14, 2006, 11:35: Message edited by: Stu ]