Upgrading old PC graphics card – Advice needed!

nikuls

nikuls

nikuls

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I have an old pc I built a few years ago.

• DFI Infinity 975X (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard
• Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 "LGA775 Conroe" 2.40GHz (1066FSB)
• G.Skill 2GB DDR2 NQ PC2-6400C5 (2x1GB) CAS5 Dual Channel
• PowerColor ATI Radeon X1950 Pro AC2 SILENT 512MB GDDR3

I was thinking of simply upgrading the graphics card to a ATI HD 5830 1GB

But I'm thinking the rest of my system will be too old to make any use of it. Am right? (Thinking of probably doubling the ram).

Any suggestions would be a great help. Thanks!

Edit: could go for ATI HD 5850 instead.
 
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I upgraded an X1950 XTX to an ATI 6950 on a Conroe E6600. It made a significant difference to most games. Those which are CPU intensive or poorly ported (I'm looking at you GTA IV) were still a bit of a struggle to run at full res.

Wind the Conroe up to near 3Ghz and it can still cut it if you only need 2 cores.

You might benefit from more RAM (especially if you're on Vista or Win 7). I've got a spare 4GB Corsair XMS2 DHX from my Conroe PC if you're interested.
 
stulid said:
Buy it.

Got a ok PSU?
Click to expand...

That's another thing. I'm on 400W at the moment. If I remember correctly, graphics cards are getting a more efficient so I'm hoping 400 is enough. Maybe 600 would be recommended but I'm trying to do this on the smallest budget possible. I could do use a wattage calculator.

IPAddis said:
I've got a spare 4GB Corsair XMS2 DHX from my Conroe PC if you're interested.
Click to expand...

I very well might be.

Is the 5850 worth the extra over the 5830?
Oh, and, I've never overclocked anything in my life so that should be interesting. I'm up for it though, it runs pretty cool with the fan I have.
 
What about a 5850?

(and thanks, yeah I was wondering about the link considering OcUK don't sell those anymore)
 
Ok. Thanks very very very much for your help! I'm completely povvo right now but we'll see in the next week or so. Also, I might get a 500W just to be on the safe side.
 
Hey guys! Thanks again for the advice. I went for a 5750 (with a faulty fan) that I found on ebay for £36. Seemed like a good deal to me. Anyway it's sitting nicely with a 120mm zip-tied to it.

I was just wondering what you guys think about performance. I'm primarily playing SC2 but not getting anywhere near the performance of this benchmark:

STARCRAFT-II-5.jpg


Straight away I'm guessing it's my RAM and CPU holding the card back. Do you think I'd have to OC one or both (as well as doubling my ram)?

Thanks again.
 
doubling the ram probably wont really help, but the cpu is probably bottlenecking the system

i wouldnt overclock on that psu, i;d start saving for a nice new system for the beginning of 2012 :)
 
Yeah, you have a GTX 460 OC for £110. I would take that over the 5850, basically whichever is cheaper.

Starcraft if more kind to NVidia cards. The 5850 is generally a little bit faster than the 460. But then, if you are a WoW / SC gamer, a 460 would be good, especially at that price.

The deal may end tomorrow. So watch out for a price hike.
 
I think you will find he already has a new gpu and is now trying to work out why its not giving the performance he expects.
 
missed that too :/

nikuls said:
Hey guys! Thanks again for the advice. I went for a 5750 (with a faulty fan) that I found on ebay for £36. Seemed like a good deal to me. Anyway it's sitting nicely with a 120mm zip-tied to it.

I was just wondering what you guys think about performance. I'm primarily playing SC2 but not getting anywhere near the performance of this benchmark:

STARCRAFT-II-5.jpg


Straight away I'm guessing it's my RAM and CPU holding the card back. Do you think I'd have to OC one or both (as well as doubling my ram)?

Thanks again.
Click to expand...

You running AA? This kills frame rate on budget graphics cards.

And yeah SC2 is pretty demanding on the CPU. Try reducing the graphics settings a lot and see if the framerate improves. If not much, then the CPU is struggling.
 
I tried 4xAA and yea that does slow it down a lot. The main issue I'm finding is just that on high settings (recommended for my card apparently) the game does drop to about 30 and below when there's a lot going on. It looks good and runs at around 60 when there isn't much on the screen but whenever there is any number of units it begins dropping.

Good advice on not OCing on this PSU.

For now I'll just keep running the game on Low as it still looks pretty good and averages around 60fps. (can still run textures in high with no problem, I think it's mostly the lighting/shading that slows it down?)
 
Considering the game being SC II, I would say your 5750 is getting bottlenecked by your CPU rather than your card.

You could use something like MSI Afterburner to check your GPU usage in game, and if it is well below 99%, it would pretty much confirm your card is not being used to full and the CPU is the bottleneck.

If the card is indeed being bottlenecked, you might as well turn up the graphic settings to increase the GPU usage and make graphic looks better, while trying to allocate those settings that are actually CPU dependent and reduce those instead.
 
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