New Graphics Card? But which to go for! Help

[Gilbert89]

Hi people,

Back many moons ago I had been a PC Gamer for a number of years spent a fair amount on a fairely decent rig (at the time) but once moving on to a more casual console gamer due to ending up a loner on PC I gave it away to my friend who now would like to upgrade the GPU.

See current specs below this must have been 6/7 years ago as you will tell by the specs!

Specs:

Q6600 (2.4Ghz)
Artic Freezer Pro 7
4GB DDR2 800Mhz OCZ Ram
PNY 8800 GT (XR8 Performance Edition)
Asus P5N32-E SLI
500GB Samsung HDD
OCZ 600w SLI Ready PSU
Antec 900 Case

He only plays the odd steam game and World of Warcraft on a 22inch Monitor and from upgrading he tells me he would like to be able to run WoW on Max Settings as smoothly as possible as currently depending on the situation he gets some slowdowns also adding to the fact he would be future proofing for the next expansion and future games.

Obviously the old spec could bottleneck lets say the top GPU so what would you guys recommend taking that into consideration to get the best possible performance for his needs but not purchasing something which couldn't be used to it's full potentional.

Another thing out of interest what RAM considering the motherboard it has could he upgrade to for some extra performance speed wise?

Thanks in advance all.

 

[cmndr_andi]

I would suggest spending around £100 on a new graphics card - the AMD R7 265 2GB would be my pick. This is a surprisingly fast card with a good amount of VRAM and a nice cooler.

However, this is a rather powerful card and it likely will be CPU limited in some games, so the next upgrade will have to be the CPU/mobo/RAM.

I wouldn't suggest upgrading the RAM, as DDR2 is pretty expensive and a dead-end. Instead, I'd put the money towards the full upgrade.

 

[ICDP]

8GB RAM should be enough for most gaming uses. The problem is that DDR2 is not exactly common or as cheap as DDR3 any more.

£60 for 4GB
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/productlist.php?groupid=701&catid=8&subid=144

As far as GPU goes, it all depends on budget. Though anything over GTX760 is going to reach a bottleneck real quick on that CPU.

Since your friend is looking at WoW I would stick with Nvidia and look at the following cards. A GTX660 is a much faster card than a GTX750. The only benefit for the GTX750 is that it uses much less power. Though your OCZ600W PSU is more than enough for all cards below.

GTX750Ti - Budget £110+
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-058-KF&groupid=701&catid=1914&subcat=1854

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-249-MS&groupid=701&catid=1914&subcat=1854

GTX660 - Budget £125 - £140
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/productlist.php?groupid=701&catid=1914&subid=2379

GTX760 - Budget £170+
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/productlist.php?catid=1914&groupid=701&sortby=priceAsc&subid=1830

 

[DarkHorizon472]

To also help performance you could overclock the CPU a little. The cooler he has will handle a small overclock fine and this will help out the new GPU.

 

[cmndr_andi]

Usually that would be a really good option with the Q6600, but that Nvidia chipset board is renowned for not playing nice with quad core CPUs and being really bad for overclocking them. It may be worth a try getting a few extra hundrew MHz out of it, but just bear in mind that the motherboard will likely be the overclocking limitation before the CPU is.

 

[Marine-RX179]

To be honest for WOW and source games, the limitation would be more with the Q6600 (at stock clock) than the 8800GT for 1680x1050 res for that kind of titles.

I had use to have a E5200 overclocked to 4.25GHz and it would still bottleneck my 9800GTX+ (around 10-15% faster than the 8800GT) in mmos such as DC Universe Online; WOW's CPU bottleneck would be even worse than that.

 

[DarkHorizon472]

Usually that would be a really good option with the Q6600, but that Nvidia chipset board is renowned for not playing nice with quad core CPUs and being really bad for overclocking them. It may be worth a try getting a few extra hundrew MHz out of it, but just bear in mind that the motherboard will likely be the overclocking limitation before the CPU is.

Well spotted

 

[itchy]

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-184-MS&groupid=701&catid=56&subcat=1699

^^This is all you need!

 

[pipson]

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-184-MS&groupid=701&catid=56&subcat=1699

^^This is all you need!

Used that myself and thats more than enough for wow, also you need a better cpu for wow

 

[altrewin]

As above, clock the CPU. If you don't mind B Grade cards this is worth a look:
YOUR BASKET
1 x **B Grade** **B Grade** MSI HD 7870 Black Knight 2048MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card ( (BG-345-MS) £109.99
Total : £119.59 (includes shipping : £8.00).

 

[pipson]

As above, clock the CPU. If you don't mind B Grade cards this is worth a look:
YOUR BASKET
1 x **B Grade** **B Grade** MSI HD 7870 Black Knight 2048MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card ( (BG-345-MS) £109.99
Total : £119.59 (includes shipping : £8.00).

Id rather get the r9 270 brand new for about £30 or so more