- May 14, 2012
- 6
- 0
- 10,510
I built this system several years ago and it's done extremely well by me. It is starting to show its age in certain games though, so I'm thinking of a low-cost GPU upgrade but I'm a little worried about bottlenecks that might make the new GPU a waste.
Current system:
-Core2Duo E8400 3GHz (Wolfdale)
-4 GB DDR2-800 RAM
-Asus P5K-E MoBo (P35 chipset w/ PCI-E 1.0)
-Antec Earthwatts 500W PSU
-Radeon HD 3850 (512 MB)
I'm thinking that a Radeon 7750 or 7770 would be a decent enough boost in graphics without suffering too much from bottlenecking due to the old PCI-E slot, CPU, or RAM. These cards are also priced pretty much where I want to be (around $100). Anything past that price-point and it becomes less worthwhile to upgrade, me thinks. If spending $100 now gets me some more time out of this setup then I'm ok with that.
Of the two cards, I think I'd prefer the 7770 just for that little extra performance (I'm running 2 monitors at 1920x1080) but if even that would go to waste on this system, the 7750 would be fine. Again, this old 3850 can still handle a lot of things well, but I'm having to lower resolutions more and more and sacrifice other effects to make games play well. I don't need bleeding-edge hardware anymore (hence why I'm not building a whole new system right now) so if I can invest around $100 now and buy myself an extra year, maybe two, before I need to do a complete upgrade, would be really nice.
Thoughts? Should I just get the 7750 or would the 7770 be a safe buy considering my dated PCI-E slot. Thanks!
Current system:
-Core2Duo E8400 3GHz (Wolfdale)
-4 GB DDR2-800 RAM
-Asus P5K-E MoBo (P35 chipset w/ PCI-E 1.0)
-Antec Earthwatts 500W PSU
-Radeon HD 3850 (512 MB)
I'm thinking that a Radeon 7750 or 7770 would be a decent enough boost in graphics without suffering too much from bottlenecking due to the old PCI-E slot, CPU, or RAM. These cards are also priced pretty much where I want to be (around $100). Anything past that price-point and it becomes less worthwhile to upgrade, me thinks. If spending $100 now gets me some more time out of this setup then I'm ok with that.
Of the two cards, I think I'd prefer the 7770 just for that little extra performance (I'm running 2 monitors at 1920x1080) but if even that would go to waste on this system, the 7750 would be fine. Again, this old 3850 can still handle a lot of things well, but I'm having to lower resolutions more and more and sacrifice other effects to make games play well. I don't need bleeding-edge hardware anymore (hence why I'm not building a whole new system right now) so if I can invest around $100 now and buy myself an extra year, maybe two, before I need to do a complete upgrade, would be really nice.
Thoughts? Should I just get the 7750 or would the 7770 be a safe buy considering my dated PCI-E slot. Thanks!
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