Saving an old PC - Upgrade advice

Prophet · 21 Apr 2020 at 12:31

I've been faffing around for months thinking about building a new PC. Now we're in lockdown and the prices are all over the place I'm thinking of saving my current PC by giving it an upgrade.

It's a i5-750, 8GB RAM, MSI Twin Frozr 3GB with and SSD boot. Generally it's still great for day to day stuff but struggles with games at 1080p (anything more than medium).

So, I've read some posts about the i5-750 not being that bad for an old chip so would a better graphics card be all I need until prices settle down and I go all in on a new system?

Opinions and advice welcome

bremen1874 · 21 Apr 2020 at 13:05

A better graphics card is a safe upgrade even if your current processor bottlenecks it to some extent. When you do the full upgrade the card will still be useable, most other partial upgrades won't be.

Prophet · 21 Apr 2020 at 13:27

Any recommendations on a graphics card? At this point I'm happy with a MM second hard card as I'm waiting for the next wave of cards to be released, whenever that may be!

orbitalwalsh · 21 Apr 2020 at 15:36

2nd Gen intel and above are a lot different design to your First Gen.

I had 1st Gen i7 4 core and swapped to i5 7600k, with gtx 660/960/ 980ti/1080 used on both, the 7th gen had 10 fps gain clocked at the same speed, overclocked this increased to 15+

get a newer card and you will increase FPS, but you'll be using 70% of what you paid for it, rest will be held back by that First gen!

1080p is CPU bound and getting more powerful GPU will only highlight that !