• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

Recommended graphics card for £150?

Associate
Joined
4 Feb 2009
Posts
115
Location
Derbyshire
Hi all

I am not into gaming myself but my 12 year old is. I have got hold of a PC for him with the following specs,
Core i5-3470 processor
12Gb RAM
250GB SSD
Windows 10
350W power supply (I do also have a 500W if it is not enough)

The only thing he needs now is a good graphics card around the £150 budget.

I have had a look at spotted the GTX1050Ti and RX570 for about that price. From what I can tell, the RX570 looks like it would run circles around the GT1050Ti unless I am missing something? Would be interested if you have any other recommendations.

Can he play xbox games on a PC without owning an xbox?

Thanks
 
Yes the rx 570 is what i would pick over the 1050ti for sure, higher frames per second and both can be had for 150 quid, you might want to connect that 500w power supply up because i think the rx570 uses more power than the 1050ti.

I seem to think this is against forum rules but i should be fine mentioning this,

If he wants to play xbox games on a pc you would need to find an software emulator for the pc and that is about as much as i would say, if i remember correctly hopefully i should get a warning,

In the past i have successfully played nintendo 64 games on the pc if that helps.

Yes i was right it is against forum rules to talk about emulation from link below.

https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/threads/rules-read-this-before-posting-in-pc-games.18281828/

Emulation

OcUK does not allow or condone talk of emulation, due to a number of reasons:

1. ROMS are for the most part illegal (or at LEAST in a gray area), this is due to a number of factors. While your Sega Mega Drive (Genesis if you're from outside of Europe) games may not seem able to turn a profit, remember that Sega are themselves still selling the games (therefore making profit, therefore not happy if you don't buy their products and download them). Examples including xbox arcade games, and the Sega Collections.

2. Emulators (the pieces of software required to play the games). Firstly, some require console bios' to function. To get that legally you'd have to dump your OWN console bios, which let's face it, 99.9 percent of people aren't going to do. And then in Europe (thanks to our slightly different laws on copyright compared to the US) it's a gray area. Secondly, some emulation is becoming copyrighted (Nintendo are themselves copy-writing emulators). Don't believe how they feel and think we're making it up? Read HERE: http://www.nintendo.com/corp/legal.jsp#roms

I personally know of shops who've been legally threatened because they've IMPORTED games to sell, let alone dealing with emulation. I also know of someone else who has been sued because of selling something to help play homebrew games.

OcUK's stance shall not change on this unless the law does. Please cease any discussion of Emulation, whether this is emulation of a 'modern' console such as a PS2, or an older console such as a Master System.

This sticky will be updated with more links soon, but for now consider this a warning. *NOTE* This also includes fan made remakes. Unless they've the blessing of the original developer.


Dan.
 
Last edited:
Pretty much correct with what you said, the 570 is £ to performance king at the minute. I put a 470 in my sons rig for christmas and its a brilliant little card.

The only games you can play which are on the xbox are pretty much anything in the windows store ie the latest two forza games. If you link your xbox account to your PC and own the forza games already you can play them on the PC.
 
Pretty much correct with what you said, the 570 is £ to performance king at the minute. I put a 470 in my sons rig for christmas and its a brilliant little card.

The only games you can play which are on the xbox are pretty much anything in the windows store ie the latest two forza games. If you link your xbox account to your PC and own the forza games already you can play them on the PC.

Either way emulator or this which i did not know hah.

Yep rx570 is hard to beat for the price and performance ratio.
 
Ah well we all contribute which is a good thing ;-).

We all know different things and be good at somethings and bad at others.

Dan.
 
Just dug my 500W power supply out and I have doubts about its quality and reliability so looks like I will try to find a card which can cope with the existing 350W power supply.
The main game my lad wants to run on it is 'Jurassic World Evolution'. It says is needs a 1050 as a minimum but we have actually had it running on an old laptop with a GT525M graphics chip. What do you think, would the 1050 be overkill for what we want it for?
 
I certainly wouldn't call a 1050 "overkill" in any situation. It's as low as you'd really ever want to go for gaming. As always, it mainly depends on how good you want a game to look and how well you want it to run. A 1050 Ti gets ~30fps average in Jurassic World Evolution using maximum settings at 1080p, but of course you can turn settings way down if you like to improve performance (as I assume you have on the laptop). Your options are fairly limited for going lower anyway though, with the GT 1030 or a used 750 Ti at closer to £60 being the last couple of cards you'd want to even consider (beyond AMD's low end, but it's all much of a muchness between the two brands down there).
 
Just dug my 500W power supply out and I have doubts about its quality and reliability so looks like I will try to find a card which can cope with the existing 350W power supply.
The main game my lad wants to run on it is 'Jurassic World Evolution'. It says is needs a 1050 as a minimum but we have actually had it running on an old laptop with a GT525M graphics chip. What do you think, would the 1050 be overkill for what we want it for?

What's your spending limit? Because you could get an RX 570 and PSU to run it for £185 with 2 free games. This will be about twice as fast as 1050 or 560. It maybe worth paying an extra £20 to get the 8gb 570, but it boils down to budget and needs.

Your next option is the GTX 1050 or RX 560, which are about the same speed and you can pick up for just over £100 and I'd personally pick up the cheapest if you went that route. Those 2 cards will run his game, he doesn't necessarily need the best graphics settings to play his game if cost is important. But he might hassle you to upgrade earlier because it's half as fast. The 1030 will run the game sure but it's only £30 less and half the speed if I remember rightly. There is also a DDR4 1030, which is rubbish. So a cheap £100 560 or 1050 is maybe your best option unless you splash the cash on a 570 and PSU. The 1050 TI doesn't really justify the extra money imo.

I can't give you links on this forum to competitor sites but you can use sites like hotukdeals and google to find the best prices.
 
Hi all

I am not into gaming myself but my 12 year old is. I have got hold of a PC for him with the following specs,
Core i5-3470 processor
12Gb RAM
250GB SSD
Windows 10
350W power supply (I do also have a 500W if it is not enough)

The only thing he needs now is a good graphics card around the £150 budget.

I have had a look at spotted the GTX1050Ti and RX570 for about that price. From what I can tell, the RX570 looks like it would run circles around the GT1050Ti unless I am missing something? Would be interested if you have any other recommendations.

The RX570 is much faster than the 1050ti and I would definately recommend replacing the power supply with your 500W model. There isn't anything faster to recommend with the budget you have.
Can he play xbox games on a PC without owning an xbox?

Microsoft is currently working on a service called Project xCloud which is designed to allow mobile and PC users to stream Xbox games over the cloud (no Xbox required). It was announced at E3 2018 and is due to start rolling out in public beta sometime this year, with a final release date sometime next year.

Alternatively, Sony has already released a service called PlayStation Now which was released on 7th March 2015 and requires a subscription. More details available on their website.
 
Thanks for all your replies it has been really useful.
I have just learnt that the new Nvidia cards can only be used on systems that boot from UEFI so I need to look into this first as his PC is currently set up as BIOS and MBR. Am learning something new everyday!
 
Thanks for all your replies it has been really useful.
I have just learnt that the new Nvidia cards can only be used on systems that boot from UEFI so I need to look into this first as his PC is currently set up as BIOS and MBR. Am learning something new everyday!

Be very careful in the BIOS buddy. Dragons lurk there that will set fire to your whole PC.

The other thing I've remembered is a weak PSU might not power a 1050 or 560. My Dad bought a 1050, the system powered down and it wouldn't work through the GPU. You won't know until you try though.
 
Just double checked the PC and all is well actually. I did a clean install of Windows 10 and it looks like it has put it on a GPT partition. MSInfo32 says 'UEFI' so it must be ok for a 1050.
 
What PSU is in the machine at the moment?

It should be fine with a 570 if it's a decent quality PSU. Anandtech had system power consumption down as 297W under load, paired with a much more power hungry CPU and 4 sticks of RAM (total 32GB). I'd expect closer to 250W total power draw with your system.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/11278/amd-radeon-rx-580-rx-570-review/16

Need to know make and model to be certain though. With lower power PSUs it comes down to detailed specs. If it's a generic part then it'll likely need replacing to run anything that needs a 6-pin power connector. You'll need to factor that in when looking at graphics cards; I believe the RX 560 needs external power, as do some models of GTX 1050.

If it's a refurbished Dell office machine (or similar) then your choices will likely be very limited and you'll likely wind up having to replace the PSU.
 
Last edited:
It is a Seasonic 350W PSU that came with the machine. I know that Seasonic are really trustworthy which is why I would be a bit reluctant to swap it out for a cheap one with higher output. There is no 6-pin output on it though.
 
Could still work. You'd need a Molex to 6-pin adapter and two spare Molex headers. Depends how many amps the PSU can supply on the 12V rail.

Got a model number by any chance?

Here's an example:

http://www2.seasonic.com/product/ss-350-et-active-pfc-f3/

Under "Specifications" it lists 27A on the 12V rail, meaning it can supply 324W to power-hungry components. Just bear in mind that hard drives also run off this rail. Stick to one hard drive and you'll have a decent overhead. Put a few in there, and you'll be straining the power supply.

It's a different story if you go for a 1050Ti though, as the power draw is much lower than an RX 570. You would have a good 120W spare at load instead of 50W.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top Bottom