He's my husband, the GM of RH in WoW and an all-around good dude. He has to play WoW on the lowest graphics settings and I simply cannot let him play this way anymore. Fortunately, his birthday is at the end of this month and I want to get him a new graphics card. Yay!!

How would a GeForce GT 630 look wrapped in some nice blue wrapping paper??

This site helped me narrow it down to that choice, but I'm stuck at which exact one would be best. I'm assuming more bits and GB is preferable, but don't know if it's worth it or if any of it matters depending on what else is in his system.

He has an AMD Phenom II X4 955 3.20 GHz processor and 8 GB of installed memory (90% sure it's the ddr3 type of ram).

Can you guys help me pick one please? I don't know if I'm missing any other important information and I don't want to have to exchange it because it was incompatible with his system.

what video card does he have right now and what size power supply does he have? and what is your budget?

I'll have to look into the current video card and power supply tomorrow when he's at work. As for the budget, I think it has to be under $100 (even though I would personally spend more...). Lets say it's under $100.

Part of the story that I didn't include is that he knows exactly which one he wants, but he won't tell me.
The only information that I've been able to help narrow it down was that it was from that benchmark site and that he once bragged that he could get one in the $50 to $60 range. The GT 630 seems to fit in with those tidbits so far. I even had someone ask about his preferred brand, but he got cryptic about it.

I should be able to have that information to you by tomorrow morning after I drop the kids off at school. Thanks for helping me look into this Matrix.

I wouldn't waste you money on a gt 630 since the stop production of that card and most of what is left out there is used. when getting a video card you want to try to match the performance of the video card with the rest of the system as best as possible other wise your video card slows the rest of the system down.

for under $100 I would go with

MSI R7750-PMD2GD3 Radeon HD 7750 2GB 128-bit DDR3 PCI Express 3.0 x16 HDCP Ready Video Card $89.99

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814127709



even though I prefer NVidia cards the Radeon's have better budget cards out there and the 7750 is a lot better then the gt630, I would say almost double the performance of the gt630 and might last him a little longer until he is ready to do a bigger upgrade. the card requires at least a 400watt power supply which most people have these days for system that have been built the last 4 years

here's the raw performance numbers of the 2 cards

sure is handy having our own personal tech guy.

Especially when it's my main personal tech guy that I'm shopping for

Okay, he has a Cooler Master 600 power supply (model # RS-600-PCAR-E3) and his video card is an ATI Radeon 4800 HD Series with 1GB adapter RAM and 32 bits/pixel. He has DDR2 RAM.

There's a good chance that I may drive to Memory Express instead of ordering from Newegg. If that's what I end up doing, will the HIS Radeon HD 7750 be fine?

both the HIS that you posted and the MSi one that I posted should both be ok, the main difference between the 2 is the HIS is a lower profile card which is great if you have little room and has 3 different connector types for your monitor. the MSi is a bigger card that has a better cooler and replaces the vga connector with an additional hdmi connection

Update: Yesterday was Sugref's birthday and he was quite pleased with my choice (I went with the MSI from newegg). I made him install it right away and test it out and there ended up being several problems. I'm not even sure they are all worked out yet, which is kind of sad. It wasn't a good experience to simply put it into the computer, update the drivers and be amazed at the new quality of graphics. Frames per second dropped horribly, colours were off and size settings (icons, for example) went nuts. After different types of software installations and adjustments made to general settings and more complicated ones in the BIOS, I think it works "okay" now. It's not up to the projected potential of what the card "could" do, which is a bummer. Currently, he's playing WoW between the Fair to Good settings which is where he was mostly playing with the old set up.

We're definitely not alone with the fps and general shite storm of poor performance problems with this card. Unfortunately, we haven't found a solution that has worked yet and we just left it alone after we got it to be tolerable. For now, we're just leaving it, but I'd like to get it working properly, so I'm thinking about contacting MSI, Newegg, or Nvidia to see if they can direct me to a solution.

did you go with the radeon or NVidia card? if you went with the radeon did you make sure to remove the old drivers first and then download the latest drivers from AMD which I think is


http://sites.amd.com/us/game/downloads/ ... n8-64.aspx


Title File Size Version Date Posted

Catalyst Software Suite 197 MB 13.9 9/18/2013


Description:

Package contains the following graphics drivers and dependent/required software for the products specified in the current version's official release notes for the 64 bit version of Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1:

Display Driver ver. 13.152

OpenCL(tm) Driver ver. 10.0.1268.1

Catalyst Control Center ver. 2013.0830.1943.33589



there is also a 13.11 beta driver on the AMD site as well

I got this one for him.

MSI Radeon HD 7750

Sugref definitely looked at the driver stuff that could have caused issues. He uninstalled all the old stuff, used the cd that came with it, went to the website and tried the newest driver and then the beta driver. I'm not sure in which order, but he's had his computer crash a lot. I believe he's tried a couple of different programs to override certain settings. One had to do with driver management and the other one had to do with under/over clocking. (It might have been the one program able to do both, I'm not sure). The one program, MSI Afterburner, only caused his computer to crash yet again.

The problem might have to do with some settings clashing with each other about one wanting to underclock and the other setting wanting to run normally. That's about as technical as you can get from me when he's not around to help explain stuff better.