GPU Upgrade Advice
June 26th, 2019
I have a Dell Studio XPS 7100 which bought in 2011 with a 22 inch 1920×1080 (60Hz) resolution LED monitor. I use it for playing games and watching HD movies. The other components include :
AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Processor (3.2GHz,9MB,6C)
8GB Dual Chan DDR3 SDRAM at 1333MHz
1GB ATI Radeon HD 5870
I was able to play all games at 1920×1080 with all graphics settings at very high or ultra till now. The newer games such as Assassin’s Creed Unity and Shadow of Mordor are too demanding and I had to lower all of my graphics settings considerably to achieve playable frame rates…
I want to ask whether or not I can upgrade my video card to squeeze out performance from this PC for a couple years more?
I will be building a new gaming rig in the near future but for now, I want some more performance in the new games that I will be playing.
Key Points :
+ I play all kinds of games like fps’s (crysis 3, BF 3 and 4, Farcry 4) , 3rd person shooters (Hitman Absolution etc), rpg’s (Skyrim, Dragon Age Inquisition, Lords Of The Fallen), racing games (NFS and Grid Autosport) and any other type I have left out. I play no games online. Everything is single player offline. I will just be playing GTA V online with my friends when it releases on the 27th of January.
+ I don’t have any liquid cooling solutions as it is the stock Dell chasis so overclocking the CPU is out of the question. I am not looking for any other upgrades, only the PSU and the GPU.
+ I have looked at the geforce gtx 770 and 970 as possible upgrades (both by ASUS and are priced similarly in India and both are shorter in length than my current card and hence would fit). If any other gpu, kindly suggest.
Kindly suggest whether the new card will give me good playable framerates with the max settings possible or will the CPU bottleneck kill the playability. I know performance will less as compared to the scenario if I had a newer CPU but I need to know whether it would be an improvement over my existing setup and by roughly how much.
Also suggest a PSU that will be required to run everything (keeping in mind the compactness of my mid tower chasis). I have access to Corsair, Seasonic, CoolerMaster and OCZ as the brands.
Thanks in advance.
Those cards you suggested are all good….The 970 in particular seems to beat the opposition in the benchmarks! and should be good with what you have and can even transfer it to a new PC in the future.
If you are not sure of how much power you need you can calculate here.
http://www.extreme.outervision.com/psucalculatorlite.jsp
All those brands you mentioned are good and all physical sizes should be the same.
If your PSU is top mounting, then I guess you would avoid one that is more specifically for the bottom..
lets answer one by one ,
if you buy gtx 970 , you will be able to play every single current game smoothly on 1080p , with at least very high graphics preset , but for some game like crysis 3 , you need to keep anti aliasing at low level or totally disable it , it is not the fault of gtx 970 , those games are just too much demanding. dont even compare gtx 770 with 970 , gtx 970 is currently the third most powerful single gpu in the market only left behind of gtx 980 and 780ti . also it has an enormous price/performance ratio for a high range card.
for a more specific explanation about games , i will give you some test results for asus gtx 970 strix , which i also highly recommend . http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/GTX_970_STRIX_OC/12.html
as you can see even with the 4x AA it delivers you 41.5 fps which is pretty good. and this is the worst case scenario since there is no game can go anywhere near the crysis 3 in terms of graphics. also you can navigate and see the results for new and gpu demanding games also a general performance comparison on screen resolutions at the link i give. in addition to that , when u buy your new gaming rig , i assume 2-3 years later . you can buy another gtx 970 which will be cheaper at that time and can go for sli , which can deliver you good but not best 4K performance.
now bottleneck issue , bottleneck can be calculated through a math formula , but even if it is not so reliable since those numbers may not be actual ones than the ones in theory , also same numbers related to cpu may vary in terms of performance among the models , especially between amd and intel. so the exact result can be seen only after you built up your system. since it is not an option to find it in that way. your best bet is an opinion of someone who is experienced with those things. i have a little experience by myself , so i can tell , you wont have bottleneck issue with your current cpu and gtx 970. is it %100 , no it is not . but i can tell you something closer to %100 is which you wont get significant bottleneck issue to decrease your performance , at most a little. for psu , corsair is 1 step ahead of all others in every aspect except price ax and axi series are the best for corsair . if you buy one of them , you also can use it with your future rig , since they almost have life warranty , if i dont remember wrong it was 7-8 years. they are also fully modular which means no cable mess but if it seems expensive to you , i can suggest a few another models or other brand , specifically cooler master among you said . and dont worry about power demand of gtx 970 due to its revolutionary micro architecture , even the factory overclocked ones like asus strix cant go beyond 170watt during gaming , if you dont overclock it like hell. even at that situation i dont think you can go beyond 250 watt.
with that combination , your system will probably endure for 2-3 years until you buy your new rig , i said probably cuz i m not a fortune teller and tech develops very fast sometimes. also i suggest you to buy a new case which also can be used for your future gaming system. and ofc a ssd if you dont have one . you dont need to buy an expensive one , just buy the cheapest one from a reliable brand. it wont effect the fps you get at games but it will increase the speed of general usability of system also shorten load times and such at games.
and lastly , you mentioned about overclocking cpu , u told that u wont but i just wanted to tell even if you are planning to do in the future , dont. overclocking cpu for gaming only wastes the resources and shorten the lifetime of cpu nothing else. except 1 condition , if you suffer from bottleneck , you can do it otherwise it is not wise to do it , to get 2-3 fps for games unless it is your personal hobby to overclock cpus