Out of Pod Experience

Well, almost, the fan has gone FUBAR and now my GFX card is iddling at 70º C.

I need a cheap replacement but I'm lost at current state of video hardware, so any suggestions will be welcome...

My computer is a desktop system with a Intel Q9300 at 2,5 GHz, 4 Gb of memory and my current card is a ASUS with nVidia GeForce 9500 GT and 1 Gb of video memory.

I want to stay with nVidia and my budget is some 100-150 euros... what should I aim for?

Due to lack of power supply, I actually need a new computer.... refer to my last post here:

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=2416534#post2416534

Like AlleyKat suggest nv 650 card family normal, TI, gt or gtx , but remember new cards are more powerfull than old and they need good efficienty power suply case, with like minium 400-450minium watt or maybe more, im not sure, personaly still use 4 year old card 9600gt, add fact that most of these new cards use new PCI expres x16 conection betwen mainboard, probably not AGP x4 x8 support slot anymore.

So while you plan to buy any new card think about your mainboard and other hardware felxibility.

Swiching from old hardware system to new modern hardware without replace meny hardware PC parts is big challenge and almost impossible these days.

PCI express 3.0 is actually backwards compatible with PCI express 2.0, the slot is the same physical size with the same electrical connections


And to the OP get the Nvidia GTX 650Ti if you want to stay with the green team.

I really would not worry too much about the data rate with 2.0 vs 3.0 with a lower end card such as a GTX 650Ti or GTX 650 I don't think they would take full advantage of PCIe 3.0. Now if said card was a GTX680 running on a motherboard with only PCIe 2.0, sure it might make a small difference but I don't think this is the case with low end cards.


Just a quick search on the web and I found this on the subject although they use a GTX 680

i learned all my pc repairing habits 20+ years ago ..
when hardware was very specific, and very proprietory

and i still view it like slapping a Ferrari engine into a Robin Reliant
old habits die hard i guess.

Huh... according to CPU-Z, my mainboard is a Pegatron Benicia 1.01, I can't find wether it's PCIE 2.0 or 3.0... only say it's PCI-Express x16

Is that good? Bad? Awfully bad?

So it's PCIE 1.1? Then, if my current GFX card it's 2.0, it's been handicapped all this time by the mainboard...

Oh wait, my first GFX card on this system already broke down, and I got the 9500 as a replacement for that one... how old is my computer?

(checks)

Huh, apparently my computer it's 4 years old. This issue is getting complicated...

It has 2.0 expansion slots - don't worry about it.

The bad news is that you're right, it would run below peak possible bus transfer rate.

The good news is that bus data transfer rate does NOT linearly translate into FPS performance drops.
In fact, the difference in performance by the very same card on a x16 PCI-E lane vs a x8 one (so a reduction to half of peak bus transfer rate) barely translates into a 3% drop in average FPS in most games on most systems, so nothing to pull any hairs out any time soon about, and even going down to a paltry x1 will only drop FPS by about 20% at worst on average.
Yes, the worst of the bad frames can potentially get noticeably worse, but on average, it barely registers.
In other words, in almost any of the "usual" circumstances, you probably won't really notice the difference between a PCI-E 3.0 card in a 3.0 slot vs the same card in an almost identical machine but with only 2.0 support.

It sort of make sense if you think about it though - most of the time, all those PCI lanes barely have any traffic going through them at all (burst load of new textures and such is the only real concern in most cases), so it only becomes a problem if you lower the bus rate so much that whatever data normally passes though starts getting bottlenecked, like, say, if the video RAM on the card becomes insufficient and textures have to keep being swapped out constantly from system RAM to video RAM or somesuch. That, or you're running a massively-multi-video-card setup, but that's another story altogether.
For comparison's sake, 60 FPS at fullHD and 32bit color is just 0.46 GB/sec of data (with the 20% overhead of PCI-E 2.0, that goes up to around 0.55 GB/sec) which could be borderline handled by just two PCI-E 1.0 lanes or a single PCI-E 2.0 lane, (but you're not sending that kind of data through the PCI lane anyway, as I said, it's just for comparison's sake).

P.S.

That being said, in the 100-150 euro range or thereabouts, if you want to stick with NVIDIA, a GTX 650 or a GTX 650 Ti are your only reasonable choices.
The GTX 650 Ti can potentially be up to 50% faster compared to a "regular" GTX 650, and some of the more frugal 2GB models retail in some EU countries for just a little over 150 euro.
If EVE is your primary game by usage time, and you usually play less than 3 simultaneous instance, a "regular" 1GB GTX 650 will quite suffice though, and you might be able to get one for even less than 100 euro (depending on VAT percentage and the usual retailer markups in your country).

Being honest, I would think that a bigger concern would be the fact that the motherboard listed uses DDR2, not DDR3. The OP may be better off spending as little as possible on a new GFX card for the time being, and saving the rest to buy newer hardware.