ballad wrotea gt440 that barely runs windows is a waste of money
and you and I know that the 6xx series will be the same as the 5xx series
and the funny thing is that you advised him of a 4xx geforce series card
What does the first sentence have to do with anything? The gt440 competes (at least,if not beats) Ivy Bridge's integrated GPU, which has improved much over the previous GPUs.
The 6xx series, as with previous series, are most probably rebrands at the low end and the low midrange. X50 is mid-midrange. There are no rebrands there, it's actually the new architecture, at almost the same performance, at much lower power consumption. The gts 250, then the gts450, then the 550ti. And guess what, that card almost matches the gtx 260 and it is mostly an overclocked gts450. Yet, it still holds its own and when overclocked, comes close to the 460. Good luck getting the 450 close to the 460.
Gt240 and gt430 have almost identical performance, so you could see that the gt440 improved over the 240, which improved over the 9600gt, same as the 250 improved on the 9800gt/gtx (this was much less though).
Kepler is a derivative of Fermi. Holding out for the new cards would either get you Kepler at 28nm, or improved Fermi. Win-win. And they should be pretty close. Nvidia's entire upper lineup has been released already.
There is no gt540, too, and the 500 series, all of it actually,was improved Fermi. That mattered less at the low-midrange anyways. 600 series debuted Kepler, that can (and probably will?) Cause a difference. Also do not forget the incentive to produce a good midrange due to pressure from AMD. 7750,7770,7850,7870 are pretty nice cards.
There *is* no waste of money when dealing with graphics cards, at least when you have a CPU at least from 2008.
