Weird needs for vid card

[n00bular]

Well I'm putting together a system for a friend's friend's uncle :rolleyes: . I need a couple suggestions on video cards. First of all the computer will be for a family. The kids will play some games (but nothing too extreme like nowaday games.. probably younger kid games) and the father wants to do some light auto cad.

I was thinking something around r9700, because it would handle pretty much any game out there and I think it can do some auto cad.

Any input is welcome (btw price isn't really a big deal but under $300 is nice)

[Jester]

I have ran autocad on a GeForce 2, it should be cake for a 9700. I think it is has more to do with RAM than anything else. We run autocad at school all the time, and those system don't have very fancy video cards. As far as games I am sure you could probably get away with a 9600 quite fine. 9600 Pro 256 MB are $111 on price watch.

[Steven4563]

a 9600pro is a nice idea but for the little bit extra u might aswell get a 9700np or pro

or maybe even a geforce 4 mx440 or ti4200 will do it well for light kids games

[ajrettke]

9700 is pretty high end. If you can fit it into the budget I'd go for it. Also what's the life of this machine? If it has to be 3 to 4 years ago, I'd go for a gig of ram before a high powered vid card. This is because lack of ram is the #1 problem with peoples computers slowing down after a couple of years.

[Steven4563]

ajrettke - agreed u should get aload off ram :)

[Kenshiro]

Well, you can start off with 512mb of ram, which is more than enough for today's games. However, I won't go anything less than that. I will actually put more money on a video card, rather than having 1G of memory.

[Kenshiro]

Originally posted by n00bular
Well I'm putting together a system for a friend's friend's uncle :rolleyes: . I need a couple suggestions on video cards. First of all the computer will be for a family. The kids will play some games (but nothing too extreme like nowaday games.. probably younger kid games) and the father wants to do some light auto cad.

I was thinking something around r9700, because it would handle pretty much any game out there and I think it can do some auto cad.

Any input is welcome (btw price isn't really a big deal but under $300 is nice)

I just see that you may run AutoCad. If you do have multiple screens open for AutoCad (heavy use), it may be recommended to have 1G of ram. Sorry that I didn't see that in the first place.

The other guys are right. For your case, you may want to have more ram instead of a powerful video card.

[shiltz]

autocad is a 2d program so the video card makes almost no difference, autocad itself doesn't even take much to run in general, there's no noticable difference to me running autocad at work which is I think a P4 2.26, 512mb ram, and a geforce 2 MX/MX400 and my home PC which is a P4 C 3.0@ 3675MHz, 1 gig of ram, and a geforce FX 5900U @ 570/1000.

[Kenshiro]

I will suggest getting a fast CPU and more ram.