Graphics card advice

[terrycunliffe]

Hi All,
My graphics card in my laptop has decided to go belly up. (NVIDIA GT 540M). The onboard card although reasonable, isn't quite good enough to play trains with .
So I'm looking to replace the card, however my question is, "with what?"

I'm looking for something reliable, with a similar specification. However, the NVIDIA (even with updated drivers) wouldn't give me a fixed aspect ratio display option, which I found frustrating (with msts), so ideally I would like to correct that with any replacement.

I'm now open to suggestions

Cheers

T

[deltic009]

Stick with NVidia as ATi still have performance issues in the 7xxx series when running DirectX 9. Something like a 650Ti or 650Ti Boost should do comfortably - make sure on a 2GB version for better play

[rogermatthews]

Terry - you'll probably get masses of suggestions now, which may bewilder rather than help! But, for what it's worth, I'll chip in:

I recently put together my latest PC (Windows 7 Pro, Gigabyte mobo) and went for an Asus GForce GT 640 video card. I don't play the latest hi-tech games, but do run MSTS of course, and do a lot of video editing. The card installed easily, has not given any problems since, and seems to handle anything thrown at it.

I'm using a widescreen monitor (it purports to be 16:9 but is probably something closer to 14:9, like most sets) and of course MSTS won't support widescreen. However, firing up TRainSIm brings a correct ratio screen with a couple of small vertical black bars either side and closing the prog down automatically reverts to widescreen ratio (and higher resolution). I don't have to adjust anything. Frame rates are very good, no stuttering or freezing (I've done everything suggested on the windows 7 installation on this site, so this may be part of it)

Hope this is a piece of useful information

Cheers

Roger

[terrycunliffe]

Thanks guys,
Got it sorted... t'was a software 'issue' rather than a driver fault... I'd updated the drivers, and 'forgot to tell them' to open msts on the nvidia card, rather than the inbuilt card
However, that leads me to another problem concering the card, which I'm going to take the liberty of starting a new thread on (sorry, Mods) in order to make my request more visible.
T