A guy in work is looking to buy a new graphics card for his five year old Dell - dunno what's in it currently, card or cpu, but it's struggling to play COD 2

I'm well out of touch with such matters, so any advice on the card front would be greatly appreciated. Also, if he gets a card is he likely to just have a bottle neck with his cpu/ram/whatever?

Is he likely to need a new psu with the card too? Any Dell desktop I've seen they tended to skimp with the psu, and his is obviously old by today's standards...

My 4350 plays COD2 at 19x10 with everything turned down to minimum! That's a £30 card running in a 5yr old machine.

Would that sort of card give him minimum settings for at least a year from now? He doesn't strike me as the sort of person who's worried about frame rates etc, or even a big gamer really

No. Bear in mind COD2 is at least 4yrs old. I can also play NFS:Most Wanted on minimum though and other games from that era. For that sort of thing, get the next one up - 4550:
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/512mb-sapphire-hd4550-pci-e-20-%28x16%29-1800mhz-gddr3-gpu-600mhz-80-cores-dvi-d-sub-s-video

If he can stretch, the 5670 will last a lot longer and may even stretch slightly beyond minimum with more recent titles:

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/512mb-xfx-hd-5670-pci-e-21-%28x16%29-4000mhz-gddr5-gpu-775mhz-400-cores-dp-dl-dvi-i-hdmi

Absolutely great, cheers!

Accoring to these charts even the ATi 5570 manages COD4 with everything on full. I expect COD2 then will not be an issue.

http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-gt-430-review/8

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showprodu ... ubcat=1699

Postage to NI is the kicker though, and I suspect he'll want to keep it as cheap as possible since he's become a dad for the second time recently

If you're still looking,

Have you seen this : Clicky ?

I'll pass it on, cheers

Bargain!

I paid about £200 for my 1GB 4870.

If this dell is 5 yrs old, are we sure he has a PCI-E slot available? He might need AGP

For sure the HD4870 will need more than a 5yr old generic power supply, it needs 2* 6-pin PCI-E connections for extra power.

Yeah, that's the sort of thing I advised him on (Dell's scumbag on the phone when I tried to buy from them before ensured that), but he hasn't made any sort of move yet anyway