Alright, I have had this nvidia 6600 for a long time, and it has done a great job. But now it is just beginning to die. I start to see all these coloured fragments on my screen (or my screen just turns overly pink or lime green) then I usually get a blue screen and my comp shuts down.

I have needed a new video card for a long time, but I am not sure what cards will work with my motherboard. I have an A8N-SLI ASUS motherboard. It says on the box "Supports Dual PCI-e VGA cards" I assume this means it supports PCI-Express graphics cards...? IF this is the case I was wondering if someone could recommend a nice video card for my system that will allow me to have some nice fps in a variety of games. (CS:S, wc3, WoW, BF2,...etc.) Any suggetions are appreciated.

P.S. The maximum price I would really want the vid. card to be is about $200...or $250 TOPS.

-Thanks,

Logan Burke (Shootball)

An HD3850 would be in your price range, but for a bit more you can get a 8800GT or HD3870. And for certain, if you shop around, you'll find a HD3870 for under $250.

That motherboard will actually support 2 PCI express graphics cards in SLI mode. So any PCIe card should work. I'm with the good Dr on the recommendations. I have a 8800GT and absolutely love it. If I wasn't trying to pay off student loans completely this year (come on tax return) I would be after another one. If you want the 8800GT there was someone selling one on another site used for $240 but I don't know if they would still have it.

PM me if you want a link to that site/ad.

I went to MB today and bought the ASUS 8800 GT 512 mb. It was a bit more than what I had hoped to spend...but I think it was worth it. However, I still get fairly low fps in Counter Strike: Source. With my old 6600 I got around 30-80. Now with my 8800, I kind of expected to get like at least 100+...but I get around 40-90. I would assume this is because of my crappy processor. (AMD Athlon 64 bit, 2.01 Ghz.) So I guess i now need to upgrade my processor. Any suggestions that would fit into my mobo?

I think Valve borked CS:S somewhere along the line and screwed up it's performance. Run the Lost Coast test if you have it.

S939's are as rare as hens teeth these days (NIB anyway) That board is pretty good for OC'ing. A decent aftermarket cooler can probably get you a few hundred MHz more.

i'm not really any good with overclocking. Haven't messed around too much with it. So is there a program I can use to overclock? And where would I find this Lost Coast test...?

For overclocking the best place to do it is in the BIOS. I don't know of any good instruction links (it's been a while) but if you google it you should get a bunch of guides on how to do it.

There's the Asus AI Booster and Ntune for software OC'ing, neither seemed to work very well when I had that board. BIOS is the best place to do it.

Starting out:
Lock the PCI clock to 33
Lock the PCI-E clock to 100
Set the HT multi to 3x
set the memory as low as it will go
disable cool and quiet if not already
lock your CPU multi at the default.
I typically leave the various voltages set to auto
Up the FSB in small increments, testing for stability each time.

I got my 3200+ venice up to 2.7GHz, max FSB was 320MHz. But that was with aftermarket cooling on both the CPU and NB. And PC4000 memory.