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GPU Upgrade

pommy02

pommy02

pommy02

Associate
Joined
31 Jan 2016
Posts
56
Hi Guys

Need some advice with a GPU upgrade please. Got my hands on a HP w9400 workstation that overall is pretty capable at some older games but struggles with the newer. It has a dual quad core amd 2356 @ 2.30 GHZ, 32Gb Ram and an ati radeon 5450. Guessing this card is the biggest drawback.

What would you suggest for this?

Budget is 100-150 ex vat. I think the PSU says max 1050w.

If I've missed anything let me know.

Cheers for reading.
 
From the specs it appears that you have two PCIe x16 slots. The best card for your price range is likely the AMD 380X which you can pick up for around £180.

For around £150 the AMD 380 or NVidia GTX 960 are fairly evenly matched.

What resolution do you game at?
 
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Thanks for the response. Ideally I want to be at 1080 for now. This pc will hopefully get my son into pc gaming and keep us going until I can build myself a whole new one.
 
zola25 said:
From the specs it appears that you have two PCIe x16 slots. The best card for your price range is likely the AMD 380X which you can pick for around £180.

For around £150 the AMD 380 or NVidia GTX 960 are fairly evenly matched.

What resolution do you game at?
Click to expand...

Pretty much hit on the head, you will be looking at one of these card's within your budget.

My basket at Overclockers UK:

Total: £310.48
(includes shipping: £10.50)
​

They are both very close so I would look at benchmark results like these the ones linked below and go with the card that offers the better performance based on the games that you will be mostly playing as one game may performance better with an AMD GPU rather then Nvidia..

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1591?vs=1596
 
KFA2 was known as Galax for a short time, the cards are OK and the company is based here in the UK, considering 8-Pack has worked with them and has his name penned on the side of some graphics card I would take that as great endorsement. 8-Pack is one of the worlds top overclockers and is the current UK champion.

To be completely honest the actually part that will effect your gaming performance is made by Nvidia anyway its only the cooler and the PCB that is made by KFA2 :)
 
I'd double check the PSU has the right connectors and 12V rating. It's a server grade PSU so isn't designed to run a mid-high end GPU.

You'll get a bump in performance from a new GPU but I still wouldn't expect it to set the world on fire - it's an ancient server based system with DDR2 running PCIE Gen1 (some of them are also x16 slots physically but only x8 bandwidth)
 
I'll check the 12v tomorrow when I open it up. It has got a 6 pin connector as i already checked that. The most intensive game that i will be playing is Cities Skylines which is useable at the moment so any improvement will do. This is just to keep us going until my pocket will stretch to a 5820k based system. If I can get my son more interested in pc games it will help me win over the boss which is always a bonus!
 
The kfa2 gtx 670 I had was an awsome card and very well designed, And was as fast and quiet as the best 670's at that time. I don't think much will have changed, so enjoy :)
 
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