New Video Card for Old Computer

[rjhidaho]

I currently have an older computer as follows:

3.60 gigahertz Intel Pentium 4
Board: Intel Corporation D955XBK AAC96732-406
3324 Megabytes Usable Installed Memory
NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GT/GTO
Antec Neo HE550 power supply


The motherboard specs is PCI Express X 16.

Usage: Limited gaming, more emphasis on Photoshop, Flash, Video apps.

Also, I use a two monitor configuration and need dual dvi support.

The video card appears to be getting flaky (intermittently does not refresh/repaint the screen & occasionally "blanks" out then returns.


Now the questions:

Will PCI Express 2.0 X16 video cards run properly on this system? Will higher performance cards such as GTX 250 or 260 be performance limited because of the the CPU?

Any suggestions as to a replacement video card considering the older CPU configuration?

[davmoo]

Any PCI Express x16 card should work fine.

I currently have an older computer as follows:

3.60 gigahertz Intel Pentium 4

He's kidding right!?

[rjhidaho]

Please educate me.

[tokenuser]

Originally Posted by rjhidaho

Please educate me.

Its not "current" generation, but that is by no means an "old" or "outdated" computer.

[davmoo]

Originally Posted by computoman

He's kidding right!?

No, he's not. A Pentium 4 660 and a Pentium 4 661 are both 3.6ghz parts, and are socket LGA775 which is what his motherboard takes. A 670 is 3.8ghz, so he could go slightly higher and still be using a Pentium 4 part.

And it is "older" when one considers that the current generation is Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad, and the i7.

[rjhidaho]

Originally Posted by tokenuser

Its not "current" generation, but that is by no means an "old" or "outdated" computer.

All I meant by "old" was that it was not "current" generation. My desire is to get a new video card which will work well with this computer, but not overbuy with a video card that would be underutilized with this generation CPU.

Any suggestions folks?

[davmoo]

I just picked up an PNY-branded Nvidia 9800GT card that I'm happy with. I don't think that would be considered "high end", but since I'm not a hard core gamer it does what I want. It runs the Batman Arkham Asylum demo, plays my Blu-Ray discs quite nicely, and Photoshop likes it. Seems like it was $119 at Best Buy.

I used to swear by ATI cards. But here for the last year or two I've had driver stability issues with some ATI cards that I don't seem to have with Nvidia cards, so I've switched religions.