Doom3world

Some time ago my desktop graphic card has burned. Now I have some extra cash and would like to buy new one. One that could run Rage and allow me to enjoy gaming on normal settings, I do not need anything more.
My desktop is:
CPU: intel core2 4300 1.8Ghz
motherboard: ASUS P5VD2-VM/S
3 GHz Ram
old graphic card was PCI geforce 8400 GS
Power AC is FSP Group Fortron/Source ATX-300PNF
Windows Vista Home Premium
as You see it's nothing powerful, but it was good to play Doom3, Crysis and other games on normal level of details. Google say my motherboard is old economic type and latest PCI graphic cards might not work. I have no problem which power AC, but it is possible that new GPU would need more power.

A core 2 is on the lower end of running Rage. To bad there isn't a demo.... I just bought Serious Sam 3 & it's got lower specs then rage but it still hitches at times, so I'd imagine that unless you also up your CPU you won't be happy.

But, my general rule of thumb is take the price of a higher end card (normally ~$500) and go 1/2 that, at best.

due to consoles holding pc gaming back, graphics cards just don't matter much anymore.

unless you want to game with IMAX like resolution (which is mostly useless anyway since texture quality isn't much better than 512x512 in most cases), any mid range card will do just fine.

and as happy said, you should match your card with your cpu power since that will be the limiting factor in this case.

here's a GeForce GTX 460 for only $120 after rebate (and this might be overkill even).
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814130749

wow, graphics cards are cheap these days.

Well, define "cheap". The newest Nvidia's & AMD's are both ~$800 or so.

If you want the most "bang for the buck", wait for the new middle class "Kepler" core based cards. Namely GeForce 660 and 660 Ti.
They should be out in the next few weeks i think.
I wait for these myself at the moment...but i do protein folding simulations so i need a little processing power.

It's not about "bang" I search for something that will work with my motherboard and AC. I have limited funds, probably I will take another graphic card from geforce series 8, sometime ago my friend try to put inside GTX 240 from geforce series 9 and it only show blue screen, my motherboard is too old for latest gpu.

Sorry, should have read your initial post.

I'd go with a GT 430 then.

It features:
268.8 GFLOPS
49 Watts TDP
=5.49 GFLOPS/W

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... k=GT%20430

If I remember right, this card only had a 64bit memory bus, which is why it wasn't real good.
You're going to want a card with at least a 256bit memory bus.