Hiya All,
My graphics card blew and I was wondering what size should I get this time, the last one was Invidia 7300. Someone recommended a 9400.  Any advice would be much appreciated

Thanks

Sylvia

Sylki,

What is the connector? ATX? PCIe, PCIe 2.0? Do you know? How old is your PC if you don't know?

nVidia is the chipset, lots of different vendors make nVidia cards.
What are you looking to spend US$?
Do you do a lot of open GL (Hardware) rendering or 3Delight (Software)rendering?
do you use your computer for games?

Hi Klown,
The connector is a PCIe, the card is GForce 7300GS (PCI-E) 256mb, DDR2+HDTV+DVI=TV OUT. That comes directly from the graphics card.

My computer is + - 3 years old, INTEL R,Pentium R4 CPU 3.00GHz, 2,93GB of RAM.

I use 3Delight the most for rendering, I don't use my computer for games a t all.

Thank you very much for helping me, I am a total idiot when it comes to this sort of thing:-)

Sylvia

 The more RAM you have on the card the less hesitant it tends to be in graphic heavy previews, and bigger textures. If you're using D|S 3 it doesn't hurt to go with a 512MB or 1GB card in the 7,8 or 9000 nVidia series chips. If you're not playing video games I would think dropping more than $100 US would be frivolous. 3Delight does not use your video card when it renders so the only advantage to the video card is when you're previewing on screen. Most software rendering engines, 3Delight in perticular use only CPU speed and system RAM and ignore the video card.

Just so you know nVidia doesn't make those cards, they make the chipsets and sell to vendors like ASUS, MSI, PNY, Galaxy, etc. So it almost doesn't matter who's you buy unless you have a personal preference. I tend to like ASUS but their support can be terrible, the cards are well made.

Just make sure you have enough space in you computer box and that the connectors on the old card match the ones on the new card (They should, this should not be a problem but it might be) You may have to run power to the card to get it to work, you may not. 

Are you going to have someone connect it for you? If not I can probably walk you though it. If you plan on opening the computer up it makes sense to buy a can of compressed air to blow those dust bunnies out too, or in the case of a 3 year old system possibly dust lions.

I'm using an ATI Radeon HD 5400 Series that does me really well on my Althon x64 (2x 3ghz). The thing that's going to make the most difference though in your case though is Ram. It may be worth it to try to upgrade that to as much as your board can take, and scrimp a bit on the card.

Thanks for the information that 3delight doesn't use the graphics card! I tended to use the open GL render as my laptop was too slow but I recently added a gb of ram, I use Carrara 6 pro and Poser now I have it as Daz studio crashes a lot loading content as my card is utter crap (intel igfx  358 max memory) , and Poser is more forgiving,  but I might render in Daz too as my pz3 files import quite well into it.

In Daz Studio you can save a file as an .RIB
that data can be rendered in a standalone version of 3Delight.
It's especially helpful if you don't have lots of RAM, a 1 or 2 core CPU and a 32 Bit OS.

The topic is on the Daz3d.com/Studio Discussion forums
http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=109277
if you have questions about it I can track them from the link above
please don't ask me questions about it here, I don't use this forum nearly as often.