Sugestions for a Graphic Designer Video card, around $200ish PCI-E16

around $200ish (PCI-express 16x only)

[BlueGhost]

hey guys, thanks for reading this. I am a graphic designer, always using photoshop and dreamweaver and 5+ internet explorer browsers and a few firefox browsers, and i need a video card to handle the work im doing. Right now, i have an onboard video card with 128mb of ram, its a Radeon xpress 200 series , which i think is crap.

I plan on also playing games on this, something like hl2. I havent bought a new card in awhile, i guess i would prefer 256mb ram and it has to be PCI Express 16x. Also, the main reason im buying this is so i can run 2 19" LCD monitors at the same time, i have an adapter that converts the old school connection to VGA or whatever its called, so does that mean i should buy a really powerful card? I want to spend around $200, but i am willing to go up in price a little, but i dont want to spend over $300 unless its absolutely needed.

[MattyMoose]

I don't know video cards that well, but, the way I usually go about it is to find my specs, and my preferences...

You already know that:
You want less than $200 (USD, I assume)
PCI-Express 16x minimum
DVI and VGA output
256MB of RAM

Do you prefer:
NVidia
ATI

Based on that, doing a quick little search around a local computer store's website, I found a few ATI cards that may be good. The Radeon x700, and a GeForce 6600GT from NVidia. I'd do a search at wherever you're going to buy it from, and find the availability of their parts, and then start doing some searches at anadtech and pcgamer, etc. Read some reviews, find out the pros and cons for each card.

HTH

[BlueGhost]

thanks for the reply :-D i went ahead and chose to spend $230 at newegg, and bought the nvidia 6800. It looks really good and has a $30 dollar mail in rebate, so i think it will work out!