a video card that says it was bilt in 2010?

i donno mutch about video cards so i just as clueless :<

Well it depends on what you gonna do with it, playing games or?

And ofc how much you willing to put out for one

well I have about $500 to spend, but there's still $60-70 ofr RAM, and $80-200 for another internal hard drive

What i should suggest is Either a 4850 HD or a 5850 HD, the 4850 is same as my old card iv had, was very reliable, never had any problems with it, i just upgraded to 5850 HD cause iw anted to play wow with abit more FPS than i normaly would

thanks, I'll look into it, and I usually have a pretty good fps during WOW

I've got a 512 MB Radeon HD 4850, still destroys every one of the latest games I care to throw at it on max settings. You can probably get something in that range for about $100 now, and I believe the HD 5800 series is out if you want something even more future-proofed.

I'm also gonna recommend you avoid Nvidia cards. I've had problems ranging from "minor graphical glitches" to "lol game froze again" with every one of those I've owned, but no problems so far with Radeon.

I heard Geforce is pretty good, but Radeon is definitely tried and true

They're apparently your only real option if you absolutely MUST have the most powerfullest computer available to civilians, but their overall quality seems to be lagging behind their performance a bit.

Well scratch that, the Just Cause 2 demo has some odd grayish squares appearing on the horizon when I'm out in the desert. Still, having that in a single game is still better than Nvidia's track record with me.

Lol. Sounds like your card's artifacting.. Usually caused by overheating or improper frequencies. :D
Did you overclock your card in any way?

Nope, haven't messed with it at all.

It's known the chip used in the 4850 runs HOT. Why dont you check your videocards temps with http://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/ and see how far they go while playing your games. :)

Have you updated to the newest set of drivers? The current version is 10.3 but 10.4 is probably coming out soon.

It doesnt matter. Updated or not, the chip still produces heat whether you have your fan settings at 35% or 100%.

Yeah I know they run hot but thats normal for that chip. What I meant was that the artifacts could be caused by outdated drivers.

Then you shouldnt be replying to me. And also.. Outdated drivers dont cause artifacts. D:

I realized I replied to the wrong person after I hit the post button. Outdated drivers can cause artifacts in games, it's a different kind of artifact but I honestly think that artifact isn't the right word to describe Shakeidas' problem.

Well, hasn't gone above 45 C while playing TF2. Haven't tested out the demo again yet.

Hmmmm

$100 = GTS 250
$150 = 5770
$250 = 5830
$300 = 5850
$400 = 5870

Your pick. The GTS 250 works just fine for today's games. (Bad Company 2 is decent on it with highest settings up.)

thanks, I'll look into it. my graphics card has never actually had problems, I just want to upgrade for cosmetic reasons

Yeah. Sometimes, newegg has the GTS 250 on sale for < 50 bucks! That right there is a steal!

If you've got the cash, go high end. Try to get a Vapor-X edition from Sapphire, or any other brand that doesnt use the reference cooler.. Cools and runs much better.

Depends on your power supply, I mean you do need to be able to run the video card.

Honestly the best video card I've used to date is the GTX 260, but nVIDIA messed up drivers causing the card to overheat for no reason and my card was damaged. All we had spare my computer could run was an HD 5770, supposedly the equivalent of the GTX 260. We had an 8800 Ultra somewhere, I would've preferred that, but that card runs hot without driver issues and my setup has no video card cooling (Because it was setup for the HD5770 which doesn't need that.)

Now, switching from GTX 260 to HD5770 I can tell you these things. There are many games, ESPECIALLY source games, where the HD 5770 fails massively in comparison to the GTX 260. There is no game where the HD 5770 runs better than the GTX 260. Further to this, HD5770 only has 8xAA unless you use Radeon's special AA filters, but those not only make text unreadable, but cause severe lag in every game.

If you want a DirectX 11 video card, I would get the GTX 470, or wait for a lower end 400 series card that costs less. If a DX10 card, then GTX 260. ATI control panel is not only more complicated than nVIDIA's, but it has less options, and the GeForce cards have better AA and run better. Another nice thing about the new 400 series GeForce cards is 32xAA. 32xAA or 8xAA (Special Radeon AA filters aren't even worth mentioning, for the reasons I stated above), along with the GTX 470 being better than every single GPU radeon card on the market.

tl;dr: Radeon sucks.

But now looking at it, GTX 260s have gotten considerably more expensive and GTS 250s considerably less effective. So maybe a GTS 250 would be a better choice, but there are some games even the GTX 260 won't get 60 FPS with everything at max, 16xAA and 16xAF, I imagine the GTS 250 would get even less.

When I said effective I meant expensive, /triple reply

nVidia fanboi sayin' "Get a GeForce 295 GTX with at least 1Gb of onboard RAM"

This will last you for the next two and a half years at least. Just one handles Crysis on high everything.

One thing to watch out for on a new video card is that most of them now want dedicated power inputs from your PSU, do some research before finalising.