Looking for GPU upgrade help, again

J

jd10013

Member
Hello again. I found this place a few years back when I was looking to do some upgrades and you guys were very helpful. So, I thought I'd come back. once again, looking to make a GPU upgrade. to start, these are my curent specs,

Dell XPS 8300, intel i7 2600 3.4 ghz, 8 mb ram, radeon HD 6870 1gb, and a corsair CX600 PSU that was recommended here.

and like last time, not a hardcore gamer, so not looking to break the bank. I'm looking for the best bang for the buck. I'm mostly looking to be able to play fallout 4 when it comes out, but also will be keeping a couple future titles in mind like Dishonored 2, Doom 4, and the next Deus ex game. according to the minimum requirements, fallout 4 will need 2 gb's of memory, and the 6870 only has 1 gb. so far, I've narrowed things down to three cards,

gtx 750 ti, and R7 370, and a gtx 950. now, some questions.

all those cards are Pci-e 3.0 and I'm 99% sure my aging dell is Pci-e 2.0. are they backwards compatible, and how much of a performance loss would I get running a 3.0 card in a 2.0 slot?

if going with the R7 370, would it be worth spending the extra money for the OC'd card and/ or the 4gb vs the 2gb?

also, the 950 comes in a couple options, but mostly seem to involve faster clock and memory speeds.

and lastly, are there any better/other cards I should consider? looking to spend in the $150, not looking for ultra settings or anything. if a few bucks more will get a good upgrade, would consider.
 
so is there a pretty good gain from 2gb to 4? I've read some mixed reviews on it. some say the card isn't powerful enough to take advantage of the extra 2 gb's of memory. also, one thing that showed up in a lot of reviews (that doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me) is the 370 is a rebrand of an older card, and uses a 3 year old chipset. how much does that matter?
 
The R7 370 is just a rebranded R9 270. The 370 uses less power. Definitely get the 4gb card.
 
thanks for the help, just ordered a MSI R7 370 with 4 gigs. got a pretty good deal, with tax $154 at amazon with a $30 gift card for opening an account with them. put me right at my budget. and if you don't mind one more question, how long till that i7 2600 becomes obsolete and I should look at new computer? I'll probably build my own once it does.
 
The 2600 is already obsolete however in general computing terms and gaming, it is still yet to be bottlenecked unless you need more than 32 PCIe lanes.
 
Really? Every opinion and comparison to the newer intel processors pretty much say unless your video editing, or running something that is poorly optimized for multi core processors you won't notice a difference. Most say the 2600 probably has 2-3 years before it becomes obsolete. Not saying your wrong, I don't know a ton about this stuff, but its definitely not a widely held opinion
 
Okedokey said:
The 2600 is already obsolete however in general computing terms and gaming, it is still yet to be bottlenecked unless you need more than 32 PCIe lanes.
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Okedokey said:
You need to look up the definition of obsolete and re-read my post ;)
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The 2600 is "obsolete" in the fact that it came out several years ago and isn't new anymore, but it's by no means obsolete in terms of "general computing and gaming". You don't have to be pedantic about it. ;)
 
The i7 2600 is still a very strong performer. No need to upgrade it if gaming is all you do. I still use my i5 2500K for video and photo editing - the i7 2600 is faster than my i5. :)
 
You have both just reiterated what i said originally. Is it obsolete, yes. Is it still worthy of using, yes - unless more PCIe lanes are needed.
 
Okedokey said:
You have both just reiterated what i said originally. Is it obsolete, yes. Is it still worthy of using, yes - unless more PCIe lanes are needed.
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I'm clarifying it because how most people interpret obsolete is "no longer useful" rather than just being outdated.
 
If you want my opinion, for gaming... newish processors like the one you have, and the one I have (AMD FX-6300 set to 3.8Ghz) aren't the best, but really, video games don't really use much more processing power than that. I have a gaming keyboard that displays CPU and RAM usage, and while many new games use almost all of my RAM (might upgrade to 16GB soon), none of them use all of the processor. My teacher at SAIT(a well respected college in my city), in the A+ in-depth course I took there, said that actually the processor isn't as important as people make it out to be. Of course you have to have a decent one, but having the best processor isn't actually as important for gaming as having a good motherboard, RAM, hard drive or SSD, and video card. The main thing now that modern processors handle is the basics and most of the physics. For a short time cards called phys-x cards were sold, but aren't used today probably because the processors and video cards make it redundant perhaps. I did a benchmark test on my GTX 770 2GB, and it actually did pretty bad with physics processing, likely because as far as I know most of the physics in games are handled by the processor, correct me if I'm wrong. So I'd say your processor could probably be good with a GTX 770 or R9 280/290. So maybe next time that you are wanting to upgrade, say in 2-3 years, maybe then build a new computer. For now, though, I'd say that there isn't much reason to upgrade for you purposes. Happy fallout 4 gaming! I tried fallout 3 and it's alright but Skyrim is more my style, along with Far cry 4. Fallout 3 is so much like skyrim, just in a different setting using guns and what not. Maybe when I've beat skyrim I'll play it more.
 
actually, just went ahead and bought a new PC. I was thinking about it, and kind of "itching" to buy another anyway. I know my 8300 is a solid machine with the i7, but i really needed to upgrade the 8 yr old inspirion I had in my office/media room. so this way I'll have a new primary PC, and move this one into the backup/secondary role :). besides, I like to stay on top of things and generally buy a new one every 4 years. and when I started running into compatibility issues with the video card, figured why not. I ended up buying the just released dell xps 8900. I've had very good luck with dell's, I still have the first one I ever bought, a dimension 8400. and it still works, but because of it's age, (about 12 years) I don't use it. can't even use a usb mouse or keyboard with it. would have to get an old PS2 one. have bought two HP computers years ago, but both of them died after a few years, so I stick with dell. anyhow, I considered building one, it was actually my plan. but when I priced everything out, it was about $100 more than a pre-assembled 8900 base model ran. they were priced at 949, but had an instant 100 off special, plus another 10% off coupon that expired the 22nd that brought the price down to 764 or something. all my builds at newegg came out to about $900 unless I went with lower spec's. in fairness though, part of that is because I would need to buy an OS, which adds at least 100. An i7 6700 with 8 gigs of DDR4 memory for about $750 was just to cheap to pass up or build. plus, would have really been kicking myself if I spent more to try and build and messed it up or had problems. about the only area I really sacrifice going this route is the MB. they love to lock the bios and use proprietary boards to force you to buy a new system. but if it becomes a problem I can just buy a board and case and move everything else.
 
lincsman said:
For a short time cards called phys-x cards were sold, but aren't used today probably because the processors and video cards make it redundant perhaps.
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Nvidia bought the company and included the functionality as CUDA-capable. You can use a spare nvidia gpu as a physx card, although there aren't an enormous amount of games that have it implemented.
 
The CPU can easily be limited in games that require large amount of draw calls and objects in open worlds... to say the CPU won't be used is demonstrably wrong.
 
Well I'm glad that the CPU not being used is wrong, because if games didn't use the CPU that would be kind of lame. My point, sorry if I miscommunicated, is that you can get away with a lower end CPU for gaming, whereas skimping on RAM, motherboard or video card will really limit performance. My processor is similar to an I5 4350, in fact a little weaker (well maybe not as I have it overclocked), and I can run any game on max at 1080p that I have tried so far, including Far Cry 4, Battlefield 4, Crysis 3, and Star Wars Battlefront. There are a lot more powerful processors out there than mine. However when I used a GTX 650 ti 1GB, which one could say is skimping on the graphics card, I couldn't even run Battlefield 4 on max settings at 720p and almost every recent game I could not push the graphics settings that much. Also running Far Cry 4 on that card was a joke, had to put the settings more or less on minimum for a decent frame rate. So of course using a celeron 2.2gh single core is going to be pretty sad for gaming, but you don't need the highest I7 to max current games out, while you pretty much need a very high end video card to do so, like a GTX 770 or 780, around that range.
 
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