Build Advice Advice on old motherboard with new graphics card + RAM

[ellspeedy]

Hi all,

Hope this is allowed by feel free to delete if not.

A friend has a very old PC and is just looking to get a graphics card RAM to give it a bit of a new lease of life. I told him to consider a new PC but he just wants to upgrade a few bits so....

His motherboard is: Gigabyte Technology Co Ltd P31-ES3G.

Main question is - will any graphics card + RAM sticks be compatible here or is he likely to run into any issues?

Will be looking at 16gb RAM and a fairly cheap graphics card that can handle games like two point hospital, tropico, planet zoo etc.

Any advice here would very much appreciated as I'm not 100% sure myself!

 

[4745454b]

https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-P31-ES3G-rev-1x#ov

As I guessed from the model number this is a really old P31 board. Meaning entry level. P35 was the more advanced over clockable board. This board also uses DDR2, so 16GBs of ram isn't going to happen. 4GBs is doable, 8 if you want to spend way to much money. It does have a PCIe 1.0 slot on it, but I'm not sure how well modern cards work on that. They are supposed to be backwards compatible but this is the first slot we are talking about here. Without knowing what he has in it already I couldn't suggest an upgrade path. A new machine would be in order.