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quick advice for noob

pl155cm

pl155cm

pl155cm

Associate
Joined
5 Jan 2015
Posts
20
I currently have a PC that I picked up 2nd hand from a friend. I have listed the spec below. Until recently I never thought about gaming on it as I have an XB1 & PS4. However I have played quite a lot of titanfall and a found that you could play for 2 days free on origin. So I downloaded it and installed the drivers for my xb1 controller and played through for a few hrs. Initially I turned all the settings up but while the graphics were great the frame rate was unplayable. However after getting a bit more realistic with the settings I was able to get a stable playable frame rate and I was surprised that even with my old card the graphics are still better than my xb1.
So now I am looking at possibly upgrading my graphics card and doing some more PC gaming in future. I dont have wads of cash to spend just now so I was thinking of changing my card from the current GTX 560 to either a GTX 750 TI or an R9 270 as that's about as much as I can afford just now. What i'm wondering is will this change make that much of a difference? Is it even worth doing or should I wait until i can afford a more substantial upgrade in the summer. Any thoughts would be welcome....

Current set up:
- Case: Antec 300 Gaming Case
- Power Supply: OCZ ZS 550w PSU (Bronze 80)
- CPU: Intel Core i5 2500K 3.30GHz @ 4.40GHz Sandybridge CPU
- Motherboard: Intel Z68 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard ** B3 REVISION
- Cooler: Corsair H60
- RAM: 8GB DDR3 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit
- Hard Drive: Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB SATA 6GB/s
- Graphics Card: Nvidia GTX 560 1024MB GDDR5
- Sound: Realtek 7.1 Channel Sound (On-Board)
 
Your PC will handle anything upto a nvidia 970 or a 290, So going from a 1gb 560 to anything with 2gb or more would make a Difference in higher detail levels and fps.

I would not like to recommend a card though as if it was me I would get the best I could afford, even looking 2nd hand might be good for you.
 
Yea you would notice a huge difference! Rest of your specs seem fine tbh so a 270 or 750ti would be a nice little upgrade. But the 270 is faster by a good margin compared to the 750ti which IMO is worth the extra £15 - £20 also

The 270x is near enough the same price as the 270 which is even faster than the 750ti so id opt for that if you can stretch to it.
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-328-SP&groupid=701&catid=56&subcat=1982

Here's a bench

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1043?vs=1130
 
r7slayer said:
Yea you would notice a huge difference! Rest of your specs seem fine tbh so a 270 or 750ti would be a nice little upgrade. But the 270 is faster by a good margin compared to the 750ti which IMO is worth the extra £15 - £20 also

The 270x is near enough the same price as the 270 which is even faster than the 750ti so id opt for that if you can stretch to it.
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-328-SP&groupid=701&catid=56&subcat=1982

Here's a bench

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1043?vs=1130
Click to expand...
Thanks.

I have seen the MSI 270x hawk & MSI 270x Gaming online for £135 with free delivery, but I did notice the 280 Gaming for £158 delivered I could possibly strach to that as am assuming as it is 3gb card i will perform better?
 
The 280x will be even better if you can get it a decent bump up from the 270x and a massive improvement from what you currently have.
 
If you can scrape together the money get a GTX 970. Or wait 3 weeks for the release of the GTX 960.

You only have a 550W PSU which may limit you to a 280 on AMD (happy to be corrected).
 
Cool, I've pulled the trigger on the 280 and I have a couple of questions about the installation. I'm fairly comfortable putting parts together as I worked for IBM for a few years building desktops and servers but that was a long time ago! So basically
1)I uninstall the nvidia drivers,
2) remove the power cables from the old card, and remove it
3) put in the new card and connect the power cables. *just now I have 2 6 pin connectors in my current card with an unused 2 pin just hanging, the new card takes an 8 pin and a 6 pin so I'm assuming I just pop the 2 pin connor in with one of the 6 pin??
4) install drivers for new card *thing I'm wondering is will the new card function enough to allow me to install the drivers as I only have option of connecting via HDMI straight to the card. My PC is hooked up to my plasma on the wall and all the cabiling is concealed in the wall I can't access the dvi on the TV without removing it from the wall which I don't want to do?
 
OK I went for the MSI R9 280x Gaming. Now I'm thinking of upgrading again, question is to what, I can see some of the most recent cards my PSU is too weak. However looks like I could go to a GTX 970 or 980. I'm wondering, is it worth it? And the 970 is a good bit cheaper than the 980, is there much of a difference between those?
 
1080p is my Max res at the moment, I'm thinking of upgrading as I feel when I turn everything up Max I start to have performance issues, if I turn a few settings down a bit I get good fps and the textures are still way better than my consoles. I have recently put in an ssd, and other than a new graphic card, I was also considering upgrading my ram from 8gb to 32gb, which I can do since upgrading to windows 10...
 
My PC pulls (In Sig) 380W while playing games. 85w Idle, 200w CPU 100% load and about 380W while gaming. Your PSU should be fine aslong as it a decent one.
Also unless your doing heavy video/photo work 32GB is not needed. Go with 16GB.
 
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