Hi,
My current setup is a 8600gt, Athlon X2 at 2.2ghz, 2GB DDR2 667, GeForce 6150. I have a PSU with dual 18A 12V rails if needed.
Want to play: Borderlands, Bioshock, Fallout 3 at 1920x1080, lower settings, no AA/AF is fine as long as they are playable.
I'm in Hawaii, where shipping gets pretty high, so I'm mostly looking in Amazon. I can get an XFX 4770 for $112 or a Sapphire 5670 for $93. It looks like either would meet my needs. I know the 4770 is faster, but my main priorities are value and idle noise. The 4770 idles almost 20w hotter in the benchmarks I've seen, but it also has a dual-slot cooler. Either in general, or with knowledge of these specific cards, would either be noticeably louder?
Also, I've seen gaming benchmarks where an Athlon II gets large improvements over the AM2 X2 I have now, but those benchmarks are usually run with very high end GPUs. Am I correct in assuming that I would still be mostly bottlenecked at the video card with a 4770 at 19x10? If not, would an Athlon II have trouble with the slower hypertransport on my AM2 motherboard?
Any advice would be appreciated, alternative suggestions or anything I may be missing would also be fine.
My current setup is a 8600gt, Athlon X2 at 2.2ghz, 2GB DDR2 667, GeForce 6150. I have a PSU with dual 18A 12V rails if needed.
Want to play: Borderlands, Bioshock, Fallout 3 at 1920x1080, lower settings, no AA/AF is fine as long as they are playable.
I'm in Hawaii, where shipping gets pretty high, so I'm mostly looking in Amazon. I can get an XFX 4770 for $112 or a Sapphire 5670 for $93. It looks like either would meet my needs. I know the 4770 is faster, but my main priorities are value and idle noise. The 4770 idles almost 20w hotter in the benchmarks I've seen, but it also has a dual-slot cooler. Either in general, or with knowledge of these specific cards, would either be noticeably louder?
Also, I've seen gaming benchmarks where an Athlon II gets large improvements over the AM2 X2 I have now, but those benchmarks are usually run with very high end GPUs. Am I correct in assuming that I would still be mostly bottlenecked at the video card with a 4770 at 19x10? If not, would an Athlon II have trouble with the slower hypertransport on my AM2 motherboard?
Any advice would be appreciated, alternative suggestions or anything I may be missing would also be fine.