Is it worth upgrading the Video Card on a mobo without PCI-E 2.0?

[rwbronco]

A friend of mine has an older PC with an older Athlon 64 and 4gb RAM with an 8800GT. The card was beast as far as bang for buck goes back in the day, but is getting dated and can barely play BFBC2 must less BF3.

Would picking up something like a GTX 460 or a GTX 560 help the situation even though his motherboard isn't PCI-E 2.0? I know it's backwards compatible and will work, but will he notice any difference or even be able to get acceptable framerates with the PCI-E 1.0 throughput?

 

[inzone]

That would depend on the video card that he had if it saturated the 1.0 pci-e slot and while the new cards will require the 2.0 slot it will saturate the 1.0 slot so there may be some performance gain but not as much as if he had the 2.0 slot.

 

[Rockdpm]

The 560 is your best option

 

[rwbronco]

He's got this Foxconn board right now:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813186098

I was just corrected - he has 2gb of RAM. I told him to pick up a 4gb kit and run 6gb on the board for sure. The goal is to spread the cost over as long of a period as possible.

I agree the 560 is the best option and it's something that can be carried over from motherboard to motherboard so it's a safe investment to make now even if he swaps mobo/cpu/ram/psu later on. If he gets the 560 though he'll have to make sure he's got something like a 500w PSU to run it, not sure what he's got just yet.

inzone - thanks for the tip and that's kind of what I was looking for an answer to... is an 8800GT saturating a PCI-E 1.0 slot? How can I tell? Will it be reflected in any benchmarks?

 

[simon12]

The PCIE 1 slot is not a problem see this chart for a 7970 in PCIE 3 note a 16X PCIE 1 slot is the same as the PCIE 3 4x slot