My PNY Geforce 7900GS is failing I think. The screen sometimes breaks up and I have to reboot. Also, the first time I click after a startup sometimes the screen will just go black. If I reboot and try again it will be fine but may have the screen breakup on me later. I don't think it's the monitor.

My question is what is the best solution to replacing the video card. In another topic, Inland suggested an Nvidea 450 as being a good replacement for this card. I'm wondering if this is still so. Because I have replaced my old 400W power supply with a 700W power supply.

Should I get a more recent card or stick with that one? There is a refurbished Asus card with PCIe 2.0 which I think looks pretty good.
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What do you all think? Spend a little more for a better card or go with a new or refurbished 450. I think I need to stick to PCIe 2.0 as my machine has a PCIe 1 connection.

Problems, problems. I just want to play my games...

Edit: What about this card? Asus 640

I think that Asus will be fine.
You might want to wait on Inland though.

I agree... see what Inland has to say.

Thanks Jenny and Draclvr. I will wait for Inland's advice. Hope you both had great New Year's days and have a wonderful new year.

Edit: Jenny, that was actually an MSI I linked to. Is that the one you are referring to?

Either card should do fine, however the GTS 450 has twice the memory bandwidth. So, if you're playing a game that moves a lot of data between the video ram and the GPU - the 450 will perform better.

So far as pixel and texture fill rates, they're nearly identical (with the 640 coming in slightly ahead).

Either will easily outperform your current card.

Thanks Inland. The computer is not acting up right now, so I'll wait and see what happens. But at least I know now what to get if I have to. When you talk about memory bandwidth is that 64 or 128 bit? I mean I see that term used in the description but I don't know if that is memory bandwidth or what.

Sharon

64 versus 128 refers to the number of bits transferred across the memory bus. The actual bandwidth is determined by the speed of the memory, and the width of the bus.

A wider bus is capable of transferring more data in a single operation than a smaller one, so in general (depending on the memory speed) it will outperform a narrower interface.

Thanks for the explanation Inland. I'm just praying that my card is not going bad. Of course it will be no better if the monitor is failing. How do you know what the width of the bus is? Have I seen it in the spec's and not realized it?

The specs are published by the OEM. I generally rely on the information published by GPU Review, they have a fairly extensive database of the published specs.

You can view them here - GPU Review