New desktop monitor and gfx card needed. Any advice appreciated.

[Daragon]

Just bought myself a rather nice media akoya pc8585 for ?299 and need to kit it out with a new graphics card and monitor. Any suggestions? Budget is around 100-130 or so on the monitor. Not sure about graphics, but I doubt I'd want to spend the value of the pc on a new card.

[originalbadboy]

Regarding GPU it depends what you want really.

If you want something that can do current gen games well then the current sweet spot of price vs performance is considered the AMD HD7850. You can pick a 2GB card up for around ?150. The GTX660 is roughly the equivalent in the Nvidia world if you prefer that.

[Daragon]

Right, I've come across these 2 potential cards for my new rig:

http://www.dabs.com/products/xfx-amd-radeon-7850-860mhz-1gb-pci-express-3-0-hdmi-core-edition-8DG6.html?src=2

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/pny-nvidia-geforce-gtx-650-pci-e-graphics-card-1-gb-18718122-pdt.html?srcid=369&xtor=AL-11&cmpid=aff~HotUKDeals~&istCompanyId=9a35962d-802d-4e67-9721-0a3328ca1f02&istItemId=qqpxmxaa&istBid=t

A bit of a price difference obviously, but I kind of offset that by the ATI card coming with 5 games by the sound of it.

[speedlolita]

The 7850 is better by leaps and mounds. However, I seriously doubt your PSU will be up to it so I can't really recommend either.

[Daragon]

Probably not the one needing 500w, but it's 350w and the cpu is probably good enough to going some way to compensating.

This is what I've just nabbed off amazon http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B...productDetails

Edit: Guess I could always upgrade the PSU too, this looks like just the job http://www.dabs.com/products/ocz-tec...174.html?src=2

[speedlolita]

I'd seriously recommend a PSU upgrade if you're going to upgrade to a beefier card and that looks fine to me.

Prebuilts generally come with no headroom to upgrade so installing a new GPU can kill it or cause problems often.

[Daragon]

Time for an update. Bought the radeon 7850 card and psu. Fitted both but only getting a black screen and mouse cursor when switching it on. Removing the new card restores everything, but I'm at a loss as to why the new card won't work. Posters in the hotukdeals page I bought the deal from have reported fitting a new card successfully but not eluded as to how. Any suggestions?

[briareos_kerensky]

Have you connected all power cables to the motherboard and GPU? Have you double checked that the card sits correctly in the PCIE slot? Have you tried changing PCIE slot (if your mobo has more than one 16x)? Are you at least able to reach the BIOS, does the PC do POST, any beep? Have you tried to reset the BIOS, if your motherboard has a button/jumper for that?

[Daragon]

Have you connected all power cables to the motherboard and GPU? Have you double checked that the card sits correctly in the PCIE slot? Have you tried changing PCIE slot (if your mobo has more than one 16x)? Are you at least able to reach the BIOS, does the PC do POST, any beep? Have you tried to reset the BIOS, if your motherboard has a button/jumper for that?

I had my brother try and fit it as I'm totally clueless when it comes to installing components. As far as I know, all the cables are connected, card sits correctly as we had an image before installing the drivers, don't know if we've changed pcie slot though. We might be able to get to the bios with the card installed.

Edit. Card is recognised by computer so it must work somehow. Installing the drivers however seems to stop it from doing so.

[briareos_kerensky]

So you get to Windows and after installing the drivers Windows goes kaputt? Have you uninstalled all previous drivers and used the most recent ones from AMD's website?

[Adrock]

If its booting into windows at all you should be ok in terms of the installation.

Clearly something is going wrong with the windows side of it all. Have you looked at getting an older release of the drivers? Or newer if you're using the ones included on the CD.

[Daragon]

Think I'm getting somewhere at last. Driver installed and the computer's been reset several times. Just installing max Payne 3 as a benchmark to see if the card is functioning properly.

[djtickle]

Think I'm getting somewhere at last. Driver installed and the computer's been reset several times. Just installing max Payne 3 as a benchmark to see if the card is functioning properly.

Here's a benchmark you might be interested in.

http://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/benchmark/en/index.html

I expect you might hit around the 4500 mark.

[Daragon]

Happy to report everything working now and quite nicely too. Thanks for that benchmark tickle, will give it a try this evening.