If you were wondering about system performance

[Lissa]

My graphics card is quite outdated, I'm using a ATI Radeon HD 3650. Guess I have to use lowest settings?

I'm using a 3 year old 512 MB ATI Radeon 4870, and I had graphics all the way up. Not sure how old the 3650 is for comparison.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gami...107-7.html

Has a nice listing of GPU "Tiers". The 4870 is actually a couple Tiers above a 6670 even if it is a few generations older. The ATI numbers are generation (the 3,4,5,6,7), then it's I don't know what they call it I consider it the tier within the model 9 is top of the line for that gen so an 8 is up there, then you go to what I consider model (90, 70, 50). Usually the 70's have more memory than the 50's. So older Tiers can be better than new ones. Of course ATI does marketing games with it at times. The 6770 is pretty much just a rebranded 5770 for example.

But to answer RedRadical's question the HD3650 is a few Tiers above the G210 and one tier below the HD 6450 which were the two slowest cards tested. So it should be alright at low graphics setting on it but you may need to drop to 1280x1024 resolution.

ATI's scheme is the following:

First number is generation since the 1xxx series came out (early 2000s). 7 is the present generation (7xxx)

Second number if effective tier within the currect generation. So 9 is the top tier and it goes down from there. So top of current top tier of the recent generation would be 79xx.

Third number if relative strenght within the tier (multiple of 10, but 60 and 80 are not used). 70 is the top here (unless you buy a dual GPU card which then is a 90). So, highest strength of the top tier for the present generation is 7970 (until the dual GPU card comes out which will be 7990).

So a 4870 up against a 3650 is a huge jump in power. The 4870 is two tiers above a 4650 which would in turn be a generation newer than the 3650.

Now, to get around this, you have crossfire (using two card in conjunction which requires two PCI-E slots on the motherboard and a bridge connection between the cards). Then you can typically buy two lesser value cards and have them run as well or better than a single card in the same generation (sometimes newer generation). As I recall, crossfire was new to the 4xxx series and wasn't around with the 3xxx series (but I could be misremembering).

So, you can get more bang for your buck if you can crossfire (or SLI if you go with NVidia), but you will require a large PSU to handle the situation (typically a single card draws anywhere from 150W to 300W depending on the card) so you're PSU needs to be able to handle that along with everything else in the case (typically you're looking around a 650W to 700W PSU if you want to crossfire/SLI at the minimum so you have some head room).