I’ve never had the luxury of putting together a high-end gaming system (although I will drool a little bit if I start window shopping). I upgrade what I can, when I can – but none of it is really high-end and brand-new. Recently, though, I’ve been very impressed with my graphics card, and I figured I’d write about it in case anyone is looking for a budget graphics card that delivers a lot of performance. Currently, I’m using a Gigabyte GeForce GTX 460 SUPER OC 1024MB GDDR5 PCI-Express graphics card. (Linked to the place where we purchased it, I love Overclockers.) It’s dead-quiet, and due to the twin fans it runs very cool, even when running games like Rift almost at max.
Phil has a much more expensive graphics card than mine, and it’s both noisy and hot. When we were trying to troubleshoot the recent problems with my PC shutting down, we compared our settings: I am running mine at the max resolution, I have almost everything turned up to max except for shadows (I have character shadows turned off, and shadow texture/quality turned down – everything else is pretty much as good as I can get them.) The game looks gorgeous – I have a problem reflecting that in screenshots, but I think it’s because of the monitor that I am using. Games look gorgeous, but I would never use it for graphics.
Anyway, if you’re in the market for a budget graphics card that will do an amazing job of handling a game like Rift, this is a pretty good choice.