Graphics Card

Ok so my dad now owns a business so I'm earning some money. I'm wondering what will last me 4 or 5 years with atleast fairly decent graphics.

Is your motherboard PCI Express enabled? Or only AGP?

Oh yeah forgot to say, I do have PCI-E.

Well.. this is the best card right now.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814143063
In 4-5 years it will be considered a useless piece of crap though.

In 4-5 years, TONS of better graphics cards will be in the market. Graphics cards become obsolete in an average of 9 months. But if your looking for the best-of-the-best right now, I also recommend that graphics card, and if your motherboard supports SLI, get two of them

I think i'm gonna go with an ATI x1800 or 1900 because I lived with a Riva TNT up until a year ago.

Obsolete? No way, yes, new generation of the cards will be available, but they won't be obsolete, not even close. Radeon9800 for example is some two years old now, and it does run current games, maybe not with max details and tricks, but still does work okay for games of these days.

But getting something that would last for 4-5 years, and still be able to play the "current" games of the day is pretty near impossible. A 5 year old card now would be Geforce2-series. Those won't even run Guild Wars (atleast is not supported, requirements are Geforce3-series and above).

I disagree. Normally that might be correct, but with DirectX 10 and a lot of new technology cards are going to have to support, 5 years from now these card will be obsolete.

Especially with games like Oblivion, I wonder, whats going to be released 6 years from now?

i bought a geforce 1 in 2000 for $200 on ebay and GW runs fine on my old pc... obsolete in 5 years my a$$ try 6 years and going strong ^_^

Well, there is a rollover soon to come with gaming and cards. That roll-over has to do with windows vista and directx 10. Vistas demands aren't high for basic operation, but running at full steam requires a pretty hefty card and that will likely increase as time goes by. So with XP you have a shelf life that will turn over soon as Vista releases and graphics demand increases. MANY of the cards out now are 2 year old technology or more with a very limited amount actually working with new tech that might be released by vista launch. There is a graphics card and hardware guide here on guru you can check out that will give you some insight on the market and pricing. Vid card prices dropped again recently some 20-30% and RAM is at a very comfy low price as well. This will all change, at the latest, the 2nd quarter of '07 and will most likely go up a bit during the holiday rush. If you're wanting to get a card, now is the time and the higher end cards from both ATI and Nvidia will assure you a good 3+ year shelf-life as they are built for vista (which has been 3 year project).

I'm sure it does! But run GW on a machine with a geforce 4ti or up and you'll be saying "how did i ever play this game?" Funny story... My g/f LOVED her laptop and it ran gw well with what she had to compare it to until... I built my beast, now i can't get her off my machine, DRAT! But yes, i ran with a geforce 5200 for 3+ years and could prolly go on for many more to come, but given KNOWING how the game plays on a ATI x1900, playing on the 5200 is sooooo sloooow now!

None, with Windows Vista coming out ... all the cards do hardware DX 9 acceleration now... but Vistia will be pushing DX 10 and games will start coming out for it.. and there are no DX 10 hardware graphics cards on the market.

I do agree that awesome sauce about the card he posted, bascially the card to hold you the most is the highest end (very pricey) card you can find, and that is one of them.

Here is what I would do to have good performance and save money by a current "midrange" card every 1-2 years, right now it would be a 7600 GT PCI Express card for example, for about 100-200$ vs $650+ card that will lose it's value very quick once the DX 10 cards come out.

Or get a midrange card now, and once the 2nd generation dx10 cards come out, go all out with there upper high end one and let it ride for a few years.. just watch out for stuff like DX 10.1 and if they required "tweaked" hardware to do the hardware acceleration aka... a new card.

Actually, I've been running Direct x 10 (beta) with Vista beta 2, although it is beta, even some of the lower end cards do 10 quite well with full auro (the transparent GUI) support. Most of the cards offer vista drivers to download and where directx 10's major intro's will be direct calls to the GPU bypassing other devices for routing and processing, batch shader modules and reduced api calls. The majority of features which relies on driver (software) changes and not so much hardware revision. Although not to be totally out front with it, since there is no final release as of now, there for sure is and will be more "vista ready" hardware introduced, but microsoft has still commited to including backward 9.0 compatability. So i think you're pretty safe for some time to come, as the release date still isn't finalized.

Current Vista beta requirements:

Minimum Requirements (Vista-Capable PCs):

* 800 MHz Intel-compatible processor
* 512MB of RAM
* DirectX 9.0-Capable Graphics Processor
* 20GB HD

Recommended Requirements (Premium-Ready PCs):

* 1 GHz Intel-compatible processor
* 1GB RAM
* DirectX 9.0-Capable Graphics Processor, with 128MB graphics memory. (64MB of graphics memory to support a single monitor less than 1,310,720 pixels [no more than 1440x900]; 128MB of graphics memory to support a single monitor at resolutions from 1,310,720 to 2,304,000 pixels [no more than 1920x1200]; 256MB of graphics memory to support a single monitor at resolutions higher than 2,304,000 pixels [more than 1920x1200]). Pixel Shader 2.0 required.
* 40GB HD with at least 15GB "free space"

What I'm saying is that to offer 10 compliant cards it may very well be a re-write on the drivers and not so much hardware revisions. Very hard to say for sure at the moment though.

Aero was built on DX9, so even if you don't have DX10 it will still run well.