Suggestions for a new card please.

First off I wanna say hi and how ya doin'. I have been reading thie site for a few hours now and really like it. I am getting back into building a computer and this is my first setup in a few years. I bought a broken system that I am redoing. It is not a hardcore rig but I want it to do what I want.

I have replaced the power supply from a 480w to a Zumax 500w x2 series Replaced a fried MoBo with an Asus P5G41-m LX2 series 775 socket. Put 4gb of Corsair ddr2 800 ram and put in an E7500 Intel core 2 Duo. I have it running fine so far but the downfall I see is the video card it is an Radeon HD 4600 series. I don't do a lot of PC gaming except for WoW and a few older games. After replacing all this stuff I am still getting crap for frame rates in WoW even on lower setting of graphics. Where the laptop I was playing on before got better Frame rates on better graphics settings.

I have been reading on-line and learned that I could use a PCIe x16 2.0 on a regular PCIe X16 slot with very little performance loss. I am just looking for a decent card that don't cost an arm and a leg as I am into the box alot more then I want to be and regretting did not upgrade more than I did.

I dunno if it helps but I am running windows 7 ultimate 64bit.

(I would prefer an ATI based card over others but if i can get a hella deal on another brand I might switch over.)

Edited for clarity and a few spelling errors I found.

to OCForums!

From what I hear, WoW is more of a CPU dependent game, but a GPU better than a HD46xx couldn't hurt. Will you be OCing the CPU? What resolution are you playing at? How much would you like to spend on a GPU?

From first impressions I'd say a new 5770 should be all you need, maximum.

I was able with to get a pretty good OC on my HD4650 using the ATI CCC. You should try that before buying a new card.

I'm with Matt regarding WoW, overclocking the CPU will probably be helpful too.

I usually keep my screen resolutiion att eh highest setting outside of the game and in game a bit lower, with out being at home I don't know for sure. I have messed around with the CCC a little bit and messed with the ATI overdrive and actually got worse performance, I get good graphics but I hover around 10-25 FPS. I would like to OC the CPU in the future but I am not sure if my BIOS will allow it, that and I am lacking in the cooling dept. at the moment, only running one case fan right now. I need a fancontroller since my board only has one chassi fan port. Price wise I dont want to go over $200 if I can help it since I am already $350 in to this project already thinking thie rig only needed a new power supply.

If you lost performance when you overclocked the GPU, you most likely pushed it too far. Overclocking is a process of trial & error. Make smaller increases to the GPU and stress test with something like furmark. Once you find that limit, repeat the process, but with graphic memory clocks. Then combine your GPU & memory overclock & test again.

If the motherboard limits overclocking, you could try a pad-mod to increase the FSB from 1066 to 1333. That would run your CPU at 3.6GHz. Obviously you'd need to improve the CPU and case cooling before doing this. Here's a guide to pad-modding.
http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=499340

Thanks to all, reseting the card fixed the problem I am gunna play around with it a little more before I decide if I wanna buy a new one still.

Zylpher said:

Thanks to all, reseting the card fixed the problem I am gunna play around with it a little more before I decide if I wanna buy a new one still.

Click to expand...

I usually just go aww it's dead... and see if I can talk my wife into an upgrade. Then I see if I can fix it lol. she doesn;t care because it means she gets it once I have it running again.