What's a good vid card for my daughter's computer ??

[dimmy32]

She uses her desktop for surfing and she plays a lot of Sims 3.
The power supply is only 430 W. ( Antec ) and the cpu is a dual-core pentium.

I want an inexpensive card, that doesnt use much power....and can still run Sims3 at descent graphics settings. She was using my old GTX 8800 , but it over-heated and died.
oh yeah, I will only buy nvidia cards, no ATI.

Thanks guys !

[James]

Well before I got to the no ATI sentence, a recommendation for a 7770 was coming your way. Hmm.... I haven't kept track of what is comparable on the nVidia side these days.

The new 650 Ti maybe? It seems to be the most direct competitor both in price and power consumption. It beats it by far in a lot of the game performance comparisons.

Anandtech GTX 650 Ti review

The fact of the matter is that from a price/performance perspective the $149 GTX 650 Ti 1GB is not competitive enough with the $169 Radeon HD 7850 1GB. At its best the GTX 650 Ti can match the 7850, and at its worse it can only keep up with a 7770. The end result is that most of the time the GTX 650 Ti is going to lose to the 7850 by more than the 13% price difference between the two, which means that NVIDIA is coming up short even if they are the cheaper option.

Newegg GTX 650 Ti search

[dimmy32]

I might consider going ATI - unless they still have crappy drivers that dont install correctly. unreliable.

[kpxgq]

i sold my radeon 7770 for $60 so im sure you could find a similar deal used.... thing was a great card for the price.. it had about gtx460 levels of performance while using barely any power.. i ran borderlands 2 at 1080p almost maxed out

[Un4given]

I've had absolutely no problems with ATi drivers for quite some time. In fact, when I dumped my nVidia 8800, it was because I was having so many driver issues. The only place their drivers might still be lacking is Crossfire, but for a simple single card system, the drivers install just fine and work like a champ.

[dimmy32]

So i finally picked up an HD 6670 for 66 $ , not including a 20 $ rebate.
This card doesnt need much power at all, and it plays Sims 3 very well. In fact it's like a new computer.
I'm glad i got rid of that crappy old GTX 8800.

thanks dudes !