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I'm going to be playing bio shock infinite when it comes out, and thus need to upgrade my video card. I have a card which is about 5 years old, and was only $60 when I got it, so it's not a good card for this use. While I can play sky rim and portal on it, I usually have to set it to a low resolution with most eye candy features turned off to get a reasonable 20-30 frames per second.

Since I'm buying the game and a video card, and since ATI is offering the game with their 78xx and 79xx series cards, it seems like I'll be saving money if I go that route, rather than buying a cheaper card and the game separately.

But I don't want to do a lot of research and I suspect that many here have enough knowledge already installed that answering my question would be trivial with little research:

Is there a card which will run bioshock infinite reasonably well for under $100?

My other choice is an ATI 7850 2gb for $185 after rebate, and it includes the game I'm going to buy for $60 anyway. So it's as though I'm getting the 7850 for $125, which seems particularly reasonable given that its a relatively high end card. Are there other cards I should be looking at?

I'm not going to spend $300 on a video card, and even $200 is pushing it since I don't often play games, but I also don't want to miss out on too much of what bioshock has to offer, so this seems like a reasonable compromise.

I assume I'll be able to run bioshock at nearly full settings at 60fps or better on a 1080p monitor with the 7850, but let me know if that might not be enough muscle for this game. I'm plugging it into an older quad core i7 with 16gb of ram and a standard hard drive, so I suspect even if I went with a better card, my system would be holding it back anyway. But I don't need to play crysis 3 so I suspect I'll be ok. It's running windows 7 x64.

Lastly, any reason to stay away from sapphire? I'm specifically looking at the sapphire radon hd 2gb ddr5 card (11200-07-20G) which is $185 after rebate:

Amazon product

Newegg has it for the same price, and in both cases the $15 rebate and free games are included. I already pay for free amazon shipping, so that's why I'm going with them rather than newegg.

Suggestions for other cards or suppliers are welcomed.

NCIX US has an XFX 7850 for $160 (after $20 rebate) and free shipping http://us.ncix.com/products/?sku=77602&vpn=FX%2D785A%2DCNL4&manufacture=XFX&promoid=1323

drifter said:

NCIX US has an XFX 7850 for $160 (after $20 rebate) and free shipping http://us.ncix.com/products/?sku=77602&vpn=FX%2D785A%2DCNL4&manufacture=XFX&promoid=1323

Click to expand...

Nice find! Is XFX a good brand to go with? One of the reasons I'm thinking about the sapphire is that it has dual fans, which should be quieter for the same amount of cooling power than a single fan.

Is that concern unwarranted?

Even though I need it for a game, it'll be in my workstation driving several monitors for daily use, so quieter is better. I'm also a fan of redundancy...

Amazon product

This is the last graphics card I had before my current one, and it played everything with at least the majority of bells and whistles on.

As far as I can tell the 7850 is also right at the knee of the price/performance curve where you start paying a lot more to get incrementally less, or losing a lot of performance when paying only a little less:

http://videocardbenchmark.net/gpu_value.html

Back in the late 90's that knee was right around $180, which is where it still seems to be today...

Sapphire and XFX are both quite reputable companies.
A lot of the early trouble with the 7xxx series ATI cards has been resolved.

Here is a comparison of the 650 (non-TI version) v. 7850, and you will notice the 7850 wipes the floor with the 650. In my mind, the minimum entry cards these days are the 650ti (not the vanilla 650) and the 7850. If you can't use or afford either of these cards I would suffer with the integrated graphics on most of today's CPUs until you can afford one or the other.

--Patrick

I completely mislinked, the card I had was the GTX 650 Ti.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130839

There is a considerable difference, and it is reflected in a slightly higher price.

I've always had a problem with the Catalyst drivers in the past, so I've largely stuck with the Geforce line of products.

Much of this will come down to how much you want to actually shell out.

drifter said:

NCIX US has an XFX 7850 for $160 (after $20 rebate) and free shipping http://us.ncix.com/products/?sku=77602&vpn=FX%2D785A%2DCNL4&manufacture=XFX&promoid=1323

Click to expand...

After looking around a bit more, and noticing that this card had more and better port selection than the sapphire card I was looking at, I went ahead and bought it. Good price, good card, and the sale ended today. Free shipping via ground, so I should have it in hand next week.

Thanks for the link and recommendation![DOUBLEPOST=1363836623][/DOUBLEPOST]

Bowielee said:

I completely mislinked, the card I had was the GTX 650 Ti.

Click to expand...

Yeah, looking at the comparisons I find a lot of people recommending the 650ti as the next step down from here. But at $130 plus $60 for the game, I might as well go up a level for pretty much the same outlay.

I ordered it at work today, and luckily when I came home my wife wasn't unhappy with me, even though money is tight these days. She recently got really into couponing, having watched one too many episodes of extreme couponing, so I showed her the microcenter circular that had this card on sale for $209, then explained I found it on sale online for $180 with a $20 mail in rebate, and that it came with the $60 game I was going to buy anyway, so in her mind I just bought a $210 video card for $100, and 50% off is A-OK in her books.

Further, I found that last time I upgraded my machine I dropped a 700W power supply in there, so I don't think I'll have to upgrade anything else to get this card up and running.

Also I'm counting it as a business expense and didn't use the family budget, so there's that.

Anyway, thanks again everyone for the advice.

I am using the 7850 2g DDR5 card from ASUS and it runs like a charm now.Runs everything on High and is very quiet.