quick gpu question, amount of ram versus power

Armadillo of Doom

Group Founder, Lover of Pie
aa
Oct 25, 2007
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Atm I'm using a 7600gt; 256mb 128-bit gddr3 400mhz core. However, I just received a shiny new monitor (yay), w/ a resolution of 1440x900. While the 7600gt worked fine at 1024x768, I think I'm gonna need something a little beefier. So my question then, should I be looking at cards w/ a higher amount of lesser quality video ram, or the normal medium size w/ good quality? I should mention that this is primarily for a heavily modded Oblivion game. Far greater number of npcs onscreen at any given time, and a lot more scripts being calculated. I want to get some texture overhauls, but simply haven't had the power for them.

For a standard card, I'm considering the GeForce 9600gt; 512mb 256-bit gddr3. Trying to keep the price under $100, the ram heavy card that looks promising is the Radeon HD 4670; 1gb 128-bit gddr3. Both use a pci-e 2.0 x16 interface. The Radeon card has a small edge in core and memory clock, but totally blows away the Geforce for stream processors. So it has double the ram at 1/2 the memory interface. Given that these are budget cards, would it even make a difference at this resolution? I realize this is rather technical, so any help is much appreciated. The rest of my system; C2D @ 1.8 overclocked to 2.7, 2gb ddr2 800, 1x sata hdd @ 7200 rpm, 1x ide hdd, 550watt psu.
 

Spike

L10: Glamorous Member
Feb 13, 2008
716
82
I think 8800 GTX should be your choice. Cheap and beast. The 9600 is more like the 8600
 

Spike

L10: Glamorous Member
Feb 13, 2008
716
82
8800 GT is also a very good option, and you can buy it in any shop, I think it costs less than 100 $ and you will run all Source games all maxed