Upgrades for a 5 year old system

[genosfear]

Hey peeps,

My current spec:

AMD 1090T
Crosshair IV Forumla
8gb Corsair DDR3
MSI 6800
Corsair 750W PSU
Crucial 480gb ssd for the OS
And a bunch of 2tb drives for storage.

My question is, I've bought a Dell 1440p monitor as my main screen and the graphics card is completely overwhelmed. I'd like to be able to play things like Fallout4 at the resolution my monitor is capable of.

Am I going to get away with a simple graphics card upgrade to say a 390 or will I need to look at other components in my system that may bottleneck performance.

(also, I just looked at the shop and they seems to be a distinct lack of AMD cards in the 390 - Fury range... any reason why?)

Thanks for any help.

 

[ExRayTed]

Are you sure you mean a Geforce 6800 as that card is well over 10 years old with only 128mb VRAM? If so, no wonder it won't run well at 1440p

A new GPU would certainly give huge improvements. If you have the budget I'd go for a GTX 1070, if not a GTX970 or R9 390 would still give big improvements.

 

[Padraig]

I would say get a skylake or haswell i5 and a AMD RX 480 gpu assuming everything is as expected upon release will be an insane upgrade to your current pc for around 400-500 ish

 

[genosfear]

Are you sure you mean a Geforce 6800 as that card is well over 10 years old with only 128mb VRAM? If so, no wonder it won't run well at 1440p

A new GPU would certainly give huge improvements. If you have the budget I'd go for a GTX 1070, if not a GTX970 or R9 390 would still give big improvements.

Ha, yeah I meant to type an MSI 6870

Don't I have to stick to an AMD card because of my MOBO?

I would say get a skylake or haswell i5 and a AMD RX 480 gpu assuming everything is as expected upon release will be an insane upgrade to your current pc for around 400-500 ish

Either one of those processors would mean a new mother board and that's money I can't really justify to just to play a few games. I'll keep it in mind though.

I'm slowing working though that 150 page thread on the new AMD cards...

Are they expected at the end of the month?

 

[ExRayTed]

Ha, yeah I meant to type an MSI 6870

Don't I have to stick to an AMD card because of my MOBO?

Not at all

Buy Nvidia if you want, it'll work just as well. AMD cards run a little hot and I've not had a lot of luck with drivers recently, whereas my Nvidia GPU powered machine runs like a dream.

 

[Cern]

Ha, yeah I meant to type an MSI 6870

Don't I have to stick to an AMD card because of my MOBO?



Either one of those processors would mean a new mother board and that's money I can't really justify to just to play a few games. I'll keep it in mind though.

I'm slowing working though that 150 page thread on the new AMD cards...

Are they expected at the end of the month?

Yes, the new AMD cards should be released at the end of the month. Will there be stock? Who knows, we'll have to wait and see.

If you're stepping up to 1440p then the RX 480 seems your best bet for price vs performance (assuming it meets the predicted expectations). But Nvidia are releasing the 1060 soon too, but there's not a lot of news on likely performance or price point yet. You can use either AMD or Nvidia GPUs on your motherboard.

However, with a new GPU you might find your CPU starts to become the bottleneck.