graphics card upgrade advice =D

[chrisakira]

hey guys, i'm looking at upgrading my graphics card sometime around the 18th of july and am gonna have about £300 to spend, its the last major piece i need for my new system and am unsure of whats the best performance/value at the moment. i'm currently running an old Geforce8600GT so obviously anything at £300 is gonna be a massively noticeable upgrade.

ideally i'd like an ATI card as am running an Asus mobo with added ATI support/functionality aswell as an AMD Phenom X6 procesor, so there are deffo slight perks to going with the red team. however if green comes out on top then i'll go with them again this time round. (just for added info im running a 950W corsair psu so power shouldnt be an issue as far as the gfx card is concerned)

cheers in advance guys =D

[chrisakira]

after posting the initial thread message i had a brain storm, i could either

a) spend all of my budget on a gfx card

or

b) spread it out a bit, and get a copy of windows 7 pro 64 (about £75) which would make full use of my 4gb ram, get a gfx card for around £150ish (still a likely massive improvement on my current card) and spend a little on more ram (maybe another 2gb set), although i have noticed no issues with my current amount of ram so this seems like an unnecessary pre-emptive purchase

what do people reckon would be more beneficial. i'm probably not going to be able to buy another big upgrade for a few months so wanna make sure i get the best out of my system for the forseeable months to come

[Sykodelika]

Join blue and I'l chuck 50p into your budget pot

[Kryton]

ATI Radeon 6870 1GB is a very good card for about £165

[chrisakira]

cheers kryton, have actually been recommended that one through

www.techsupportforum.com

aswell so that deffo sounds like a good buy, i have decided to go for that card and then upgrade my monitor aswell, im sure many of you remember my crappy grey screen inbetween all the shiny black sexy screens on the green teams table, and i figure whats the point in getting an awesome new card if my monitor will make absolutely no use of it (max res on my current screen is 12 x10)
so im now getting

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/244474

and

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/165288

when payday rolls around, unless anyone can recommend a better monitor but still within my £300 total budget =D

cheers again kryton, wasnt completely set on that card but now its been re-recommended, and by people i know aswell =), its deffo gonna be my new card =D

[[KTFO]i-LiMiT-i]

hey man, I have the 6870 1GB, so if you want some info on it, or some feedback, let me know

[chrisakira]

yeh man deffo get some feedback from ya, what kinda games have u bin runnin on it and what kinda performance have u bin gettin out of it? as mentioned before my current gfx card is an old 8600GT so i already no im gonna notice some impressive improvements, but until about a week ago i hadnt been looking at card specs in a while so fallen a bit behind with the top buys

[[KTFO]i-LiMiT-i]

well, i get about 300FPS average on CoD4 maxed out, L4D2 i have maxed out, and no lagg whatsoever, but dunno my FPS, il look later, world at war maxed out i get about 280fps avg, and black ops maxed out, no lagg at all, dunno my fps on that either. Im running all these games on a 1920x1080 res

and as for the top buys, the AMD Radeon HD 6990 - £500 odd for the biggest one, 4gb or something ridiculous xD