Will any PCI Express 2 gpu work in this, or any motherboard: Asus F2A55-M LK2 PLUS Motherboard. By this I mean ATI cards and NVidia cards, not PCI 1 vs PCI 2 and so on. Can I use either brand of card (or another brand) or am I restricted to a single brand with this mobo.
Sorry if I've not my question clear enough.
Thanks.
Awesome thanks. Would you recommend one or the other, or even another brand? Just so you know I'm not wanting to spend over ~£120 (~$186 at current exchange rates for international people) so which brand is better in that price bracket? Thanks
There are not really any other brands, it's either Nvidia or AMD.
If you really cannot go any higher than £120 then you would be looking at the Nvidia 650ti or AMD HD7790.
These are both PCI-e 3.0 but are backwards compatible.
Have a look at some reviews for both.
There is also a 650ti Boost version which is more powerful, but realistically you would need to spend £130 for that.
Another thing you need to take into account is your power supply, you have a laptop listed in your specs so I don't know what PSU you have with your PC, but both cards will require a 500 watt one.
Paul.
I should have explained, I'm searching the web, mainly Amazon, for PC components to build my own desktop PC. The laptop is my current PC which is really quite old and slow now. Just doing a quick search for a 500w psu I found this: Thermaltake PSU SMART 630W. It a bit over, but is roughly the same price that the one I was going to buy is at the moment. From my own research, I found 3 cards, which seem to be fairly good for what they cost, two of them are nearer the £100 mark than £120.
MSI AMD HD7850 1GB DDR5 PCI-E Graphics Card: Amazon.co.uk: Computers & Accessories
http://www.amazon.co.uk/DirectCU-Gra...I3VLB6JSDV8UXC
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sapphire-Vap...=IAQUMHVPXVWM5
Thanks
That is a good price for the 7850 and it is by far the best card, I was going to suggest it but figured it would be over your budget. If you can stretch to that then go for it, you will not be disappointed.
Paul.
If I can find a cheaper case or something, I may be able to get it, what about the other card I linked, any good or not worth it?
They go up in performance per model, out of all the ones we have spoke of the 7770 is the lowest, then the 7790 that I mentioned and then the 7850.
Have a look here for a comparison on how they perform on one particular benchmark - PassMark Software - Video Card Benchmarks - High End Video Cards
The 7770 scores 2156
The 7790 scores 3106
The 7950 scores 3708
But like I said, have a look around for some individual reviews on all the cards.
Paul.
7850 all the way, gets you to the 256-bit memory architecture, which the 77xx is only 128-bit.
That jump requires more power, but a 500w+ should handle it, unless you have a lot of other components.
Use hwcompare.com to see the differences in video cards.
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