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Upgrade - Worth It?

jcb33

jcb33

jcb33

Soldato
Joined
11 Apr 2003
Posts
4,216
Location
Notts
Hey all,

I mostly game on the 360 now, however with recent games such as DOW2 I have been finding that my PC does not run them so well, my question is however would it be worth upgrading the graphics card?

My Spec:

AMD X2 4800+
2GB PC3200 DDR
ATI 1900XTX 512MB

I am looking at this card to upgrade to:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-120-XF

A) Now would I notice much of an improvement over what I already have?

B) Would it be worth upgrading taking my CPU and RAM into account?

C) How much better is the 4870, to the 4850? Is it worth the extra £50?

Thanks all!
Jcb33.
 
The CPU/RAM will limit the card, but you will still notice a big difference compared to your present card. and if you upgrade your mobo/cpu/ram in near future you can always transfer the gfx card across
 
TK421 said:
sorry man but the cpu and ram will just be a bottleneck for that card.
Click to expand...

Very true but still an big improvement. I went from a X800XT to a 8800GTS 320 with an overclocked X2 4200+ @ 3Ghz and saw a big leap. I got another massive leap upgrading to a 8800GTS 512Mb and yet again to a 4870 (although much smaller than the 8800GTS 512 leap)

However, I was still being held back by the 4200+ and when I got a q6600 I saw yet another massive leap (the cpu held me back in some games by 25% - crysis went from 29 fps to 40 fps)

So yes, you will see a good improvement but unless you are planning on upgrading your cpu/rig shortly I would stick with the 4850 and save some money.
 
I was in a situation similar to yours a while back, and decided to keep my old rig for a while before upgrading. Even with a fairly dated processor (AMD Barton) I got a pretty noticeable improvement without spending too much on a graphics card, and was able to game quite happily for a while

An ATI 4850 would probably do you for now and will give a good performance boost if you want to keep your rig.

Ideally a full upgrade would be great if you are willing to spend some cash; and in this case a 4870 would be good. However, if you mostly game on the XB360 then you might not find a complete new rig to be particularly "good value".
 
I recently upgraded my graphics card from an X1900XTX 512Mb to a 9800GTX+.

The increase in performance by swapping the card out for the 9800GTX+ was quite simply astounding. :eek:

The X1900XTX was no slouch but getting a bit long in the tooth and more recent games were not able to be played at maxed out settings.

Whereas now with the new card, every single game I have installed over the past few weeks is simply flying along with everything ramped right up to the maximum. Frame rates are a similar story.

The rest of my system spec is in my sig, it is a rather modest system by todays standards but by upgrading the graphics card I think I have added a good few months onto the old dogs lifespan. :D
 
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