Getting Geeky

Posted on July 29, 2004    Posted by John Scalzi

Like many sad pathetic gaming freaks, I will be rushing out sometime next week to grab a copy of Doom 3 from my local store, not doubt beating other pasty geeks over the head for the last remaining copy. Prior to doing so, however, I want to give some consideration to upgrading my video card, so I can enjoy my geekage even more than I will right now. However, what with my computer being 18 months old, I don’t want to make the stupid mistake of buying more video card than my computer can handle. With that in mind, I was hoping some of you more technically knowledgeable Whatever readers might be able to suggest an appropriate video card for yours truly.

To help you in your advice, the specs of my computer can be found here — it’s a vpr matrix FT-5110-PE which has been essentially unfiddled with, with the exception of me adding in an additional hard drive (the former C drive of my previous computer) and swapping out the 64MB GeForce4 MX420 graphics card with a 128 MB GeForce 4 Ti4200 (PCI bus). The only other thing which I suspect may be relevant that although the computer is a Pentium 4, it does not feature hyperthreading.

I suspect with this sort of rig, going for a GeForce 6800 Ultra (or its ATI equivalent) would be sort of pointless, which is just fine, because I’m not in a rush to spend $500 or more on a video card. But I’d be willing to spend up to $200 (maybe $250) for something appropriate (I can justify this ridiculous expense to my self because Half-Life 2 is also on the way). In absence of any other ideas, I’m looking along the lines of something like this — but again, if anyone can suggest a card that might make better sense for my rig that hits in my price range, I’m all ears. You can drop me an e-mail or (of course), just leave a comment. Thanks.