Just doing a favour for my colleague at work. She would like some advice on a graphics card.

This is her motherboard:
ASUS M4A78L-M
http://www.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=YagmSfSD3EvKe6g7

and this is her graphics card that she would like to get:
AMD Radeonâ„¢ HD 6850 Graphics
http://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/ ... rview.aspx

Her budget is approx £150 and her main reason for wanting it is to play the Sims 3.

She currently has an integrated graphics card but the computer doesnt seem to be able to handle it - her game keeps crashing after 5 mins so she's guessing its graphics card that is the problem

The card she wants isn't on the list of supported graphics cards but she thinks the list might be out of date.
http://www.thesims3.com/game/systemreq

Her system is AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 6000+ 3.10GHz, 4GB Ram, Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 32 bit

Any help appreciated

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Classy is when a woman has everything to flaunt, but chooses not to show it!

The 6850 is ok. Although, if you look at the minimum requirements for sims3, worse cards then her integrated card are on there. So, buying that graphics card probably won't fix much I'm afraid, as the minimum requirements suggest the problem lies somewhere else.
I've been running amd dual cores for quite a while and I was very disappointed with it all that time. When I made the switch back to pentium when they came with their new dual cores and quad cores, the difference was so immense, it made me even more disappointed with AMD.
Another thing, vista sucks and that's not the fanboy talking in me, it really sucks.
When's the last time she reinstalled windows on that computer? She should run 64 bit on that computer to get the max out of the last gig of ram anyway. If she doesn't wanna step back to xp 64 bit, I'd say try installing win 7 64 bit on there. I don't know how the machine would be running that, my guess is better then vista as vista is the worst My guess is that she is already running that vista install for over 2 years now?
Anyway, reinstall windows, install the propper graphic drivers and see how it runs then.

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M.A.S.K. , is the mighty power that can save the day

The Sims 3 also doesn't really like vista since the game can sometimes be quite unstable and has a tendency to crash and glitch so vista would probably be the worst thing to run it on. I would either downgrade to XP or get windows 7.
Also a hint would be if you have the Ambitions or Late Night Expansion pack restart the game every now and then due to a current bug that slows down the game after a while due to traffic.

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:)
:(
:l

Is only the game crashing, or is it also bluescreening ?

Thanks for the advice, I've just reported back to her so awaiting her reply

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Classy is when a woman has everything to flaunt, but chooses not to show it!

Runs fine for me and never crashes.

Is it bad that I'm more embarrassed to admit I own the sims games that to post pictures of me in dresses here?

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Just heard back from my colleague. She thanks you all very much for your advice. Apparently she got a card for xmas and said that Bucky was right, it didn't make a blind bit of difference and the problem must be elsewhere. Not a waste of money on her behalf at least. She also said that she has managed to get the Sims to work. So all is good

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Classy is when a woman has everything to flaunt, but chooses not to show it!