Limiting factor of motherboard

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GamerJ98M

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Sep 14, 2016
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Hey y'all

So I'm slowly tryna piece together a reasonable PC for moderate use (ie games but not max graphics etc) and I'm kinda new to this whole shizzle XD

My mobo is as ASRock 990FX Extreme3 with an AMD FX-4130 CPU.

My graphics card is a whopping 1024MB ATI AMD Radeon HD 5450 which I'm desperate to upgrade - this leads me to the question: What is the limiting factor (or what is commonly the limiting factor) when upgrading graphics?

GamerJ98m
 
Solution
Wolfshadw
Common factors are your power supply and your processor. If your motherboard has a PCI-Ex16 slot, it's a non-issue for graphics.

You need a quality power supply in order to safely provide power to your new graphics card. Many higher end graphic cards require additional power than what the motherboard can provide (industry standard says the motherboard will supply up to 75 watts of power through the PCI-Ex16 slot). This comes in the form of 6-pin or 8-pin (6+2pin) PCIe power ports on the card. If your power supply does not have these power connectors, it's a fair bet it wasn't designed to be used to power such a card and shouldn't be used for such.

What CPU you have also plays a factor in what graphics card you *should* get...
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maxalge

maxalge

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psu

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case size
 
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Eximo

Eximo

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Power usually. For the basics you can judge your power supply by the number and type of PCIe power connectors that it has. It should support anything that can be plugged in without using adapters. For more feedback on that get the model of your power supply.

FX-4130 CPU is fairly weak by today's standards, so it will also act as a limit to what you will get out of recent GPUs.

And most important of all, how much do you have to spend?

+1 Case size as well.
 
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Wolfshadw

Wolfshadw

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Common factors are your power supply and your processor. If your motherboard has a PCI-Ex16 slot, it's a non-issue for graphics.

You need a quality power supply in order to safely provide power to your new graphics card. Many higher end graphic cards require additional power than what the motherboard can provide (industry standard says the motherboard will supply up to 75 watts of power through the PCI-Ex16 slot). This comes in the form of 6-pin or 8-pin (6+2pin) PCIe power ports on the card. If your power supply does not have these power connectors, it's a fair bet it wasn't designed to be used to power such a card and shouldn't be used for such.

What CPU you have also plays a factor in what graphics card you *should* get (note: I said "should" and not "could"). As mentioned before, as long as you have a motherboard with a PCI-Ex16 expansion slot and a sufficient power supply, you can install any graphics card you want. However, you need to be aware that graphic card capabilities and CPU capabilities kind of go hand in hand. A low end processor would limit the productivity of a high end graphics card. This is what is often called (and I hate this term) a bottleneck.

Given your processor, I'd probably not go any better that a GTX 1050Ti or Radeon RX-460.

-Wolf sends
 
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GamerJ98M

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Sep 14, 2016
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Hmm, interesting, thanks for your feedback! My PSU is now an XFX 450W Core Edition 80+ Bronze...and it has ALOT of spare cables compared to what my machine currently uses haha XD

Price wise, I'm looking max £100 so the RX460 fits nicely in that range!

Case size, it fits a full ATX board with room to spare so I don't see it being an issue?

Again, I've no experience as such with the whole PC building lol, been a laptop person my whole life!!

GamerJ98M
 
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