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Upgrading GPU on old PC, rather clueless.

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  • Graphics Cards
  • CPUs
  • Graphics
Last response: in Graphics & Displays
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April 13, 2013 1:40:05 PM

Hi there, I've had this computer for a while now, but it's really showing it's age, and I'm looking to upgrade it. Being a student and only having a part time job because of it, I don't have much free cash- but after doing a little research I thought I'd stick an Radeon 7850 HD 2GB in there.
But my question is, how much will my setup limit it's effectiveness as a graphics card? I understand that my CPU is crap, but to upgrade that (cheapest one for best results I thought would be the AMD Phenom x4 965 Black Edition or whatever it's called, runs at 3.6ghz) but that would require another motherboard, and thus some new RAM, and the price stacks up.

Here is my PCs spec:

PC: Advent Centurion CPD1303
CPU: AMD Phenom II x2 545 @3.0ghz
Motherboard: Foxconn A7VMX-K
Graphics Card: Radeon HD 5550 512MB DDR3
RAM: 4GB - 2 x 2GB DDR2 400mhz (max RAM supported By Board)
PSU: 405Watt, Make - CWT, Model - PUFP405P

How serious will the bottleneck be should I get the new graphics card? And would I NEED to upgrade anything else, to run it? I'm rather clueless when it comes to PSUs and really computers in general, sorry about that :p .

Thank you.

More about : upgrading gpu clueless

April 13, 2013 2:44:12 PM

It really depends what games you are going to be running to what should be upgraded however the system is quite outdated and if it was me i'd start putting the money away to get a new system. Having said that your cpu will bottleneck the card quite a bit in games that can utilize more than 2 cores e.g. bf3 but if you overclock it should be okay with most games that aren't cpu intensive won't run aswell as that card can as there will always be a bottleneck with this system but should see decent performance.
April 14, 2013 7:18:02 AM

  1.  
newbie1337 said:
It really depends what games you are going to be running to what should be upgraded however the system is quite outdated and if it was me i'd start putting the money away to get a new system.


To be honest, I'm a bit of a Skyrim nut, and that will pro'lly be what I'll be playing most. With my current setup, aside from the game looking worse than the 'lil 'ol Xbox version, it doesn't seem to lag much in cities, or other what I would presume to be high stress areas.

I suppose a CPU + motherboard + RAM combo will cost similar amounts to the GPU, but with my impatience... I thought the GPU would show more of a difference strait away. Am I right?
April 14, 2013 8:18:57 AM

TsTacenda said:
  1.  
newbie1337 said:
It really depends what games you are going to be running to what should be upgraded however the system is quite outdated and if it was me i'd start putting the money away to get a new system.


To be honest, I'm a bit of a Skyrim nut, and that will pro'lly be what I'll be playing most. With my current setup, aside from the game looking worse than the 'lil 'ol Xbox version, it doesn't seem to lag much in cities, or other what I would presume to be high stress areas.

I suppose a CPU + motherboard + RAM combo will cost similar amounts to the GPU, but with my impatience... I thought the GPU would show more of a difference strait away. Am I right?


Well considering your current gpu isn't even a entry level gaming card you would see a bigger improvement for now by upgrading the video card however I had this dilemma where i was upgrading on a system with a i5 650 and 8gbs of ram i had a 6870 and upgraded to a 660ti, the performance was worse in most cases as the cpu was that far behind it just lagged and made most games unplayable. I'd upgrade the system first due to my previous experience where i had to buy a whole system anyway and didn't see any benefit at all.
!