Graphics card help!

jonewer

OK, so probably time to upgrade my PC and that means its graphics card in particular as World of Tanks is proving too much for it and causing mid-game shut-downs

I currently have a Radeon HD4800 series and I'd probably be looking to spend around £150 on a card.

Completely baffled by the range of cards now available.

No idea whats what. Can anyone advise?

Thanks.

macman

Difficult without knowing the make and model of your PC...

jonewer

MESH-built 2008 vintage Dual Core Pentium E6300 2.8GHz
Running 4Gb RAM with a Radeon HD4800 on PCIe
ASUS P5QPL-AM board.

Willing to upgrade power supply and will be upgrading the RAM too....

Thanks, if you need more info, I'll try and find it. Let me know what.

Cisco001

For £150, get R7 270X


Your CPU a bit weak. May worth considering spending £40 for a second hand quad core if you motherboard could take it.

PenguinJim

The Q6600 CPU will fit that motherboard, and is a classic. You should be able to get one for £30 or less from somewhere like eBay.

As you'll still be CPU-limited, a 270X will be throttled by that system. You could get an older card like a GTX 560 for about £80, which does all of today's games in 1080P if you change Shadows from "Ultra" to "Medium". (The GTX 560 Ti is almost identical, but a bit faster)

That will leave you with over £40 from your budget to get a nice 128GB SSD for Windows and a few applications/games. :dance:

Another 4GB of RAM might be nice in the future, but it shouldn't be essential for you today.

jonewer

PenguinJim wrote: »

The Q6600 CPU will fit that motherboard, and is a classic. You should be able to get one for £30 or less from somewhere like eBay.

As you'll still be CPU-limited, a 270X will be throttled by that system. You could get an older card like a GTX 560 for about £80, which does all of today's games in 1080P if you change Shadows from "Ultra" to "Medium". (The GTX 560 Ti is almost identical, but a bit faster)

That will leave you with over £40 from your budget to get a nice 128GB SSD for Windows and a few applications/games. :dance:

Another 4GB of RAM might be nice in the future, but it shouldn't be essential for you today.

Interesting. So would you say a better processor is more important here than some another 4gb RAM?

Cycrow

jonewer wrote: »

Interesting. So would you say a better processor is more important here than some another 4gb RAM?

i would. 4GB is perfectly adequate for most games. Very few games are actually 64bit so they cant use more than 4GB ram anyways. When playing games, you could check how much ram is currently being used, if you are not close to using all of it, then extra ram wont make much of a difference really.

Having more than 4GB would be useful and have some benefit, but not as much as the GPU or CPU upgrade would have (there are a few special cases where some games really do need alot more ram)

jonewer

Another quick question - how do I know if the MB will accept this graphics card - the manual states it has a PCIe x16 slot but will this accept a PCIe 3.0 card?

PenguinJim

Yes, that's fine. It might be a good idea today to make sure your motherboard BIOS is up-to-date, to make sure any earlier incompatibility issues have been fixed.

Which graphics card? Some will require two 6-pin power cables to be connected. Your older PSU *might* not have the right (or enough) connectors. There should be one or two molex adapters in the graphics card's box, but it's worth checking before you start installing, as you *may* have to order an extra one.

(And yes, get the CPU and GPU before the RAM. And an SSD, too! )

jonewer

Well, any PCIe 3.0 card. I'll probably be getting someone to do the build for me as I have a reverse midas touch when it comes to PC hardware - anything I touch turns to ****!

How easy is it to move Win7 to an SSD?

PenguinJim

You could clone your old drive, shrink it down to the SSD size, and then convert it to be better-suited for SSD (as SSDs need to be treated differently to HDDs by Windows). But I'd recommend a fresh install.