Dragon Age Inquisition - Benefit from graphics card upgrade?

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kol12

kol12

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Jan 26, 2015
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Hi, Im playing Dragon Age Inquisition quite smoothly on my machine on the settings I have but feel certain areas could be improved most noticeably when characters effects are used in battle. Are the effects cpu reliant or gpu? Would a graphics card upgrade improve this area?

System: Asus p5kr
Intel Q6700 (AI nos 2.8ghz)
6gb ram ddr2 800
Ati HD5770
High Power 430w
 
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I'd say it is the best card you're likely to get that wouldn't be held back too badly by your CPU. If you're partial to AMD cards you can look at the Radeon HD 7790 or R7 260x, which perform about the same as the 750Ti, though they do use a bit more power, but you may be able to grab one of those for slightly cheaper. Most of the cards out right now that are faster than that are going to draw too much power to use safely with your current power supply.

Older gen cards faster than the 750Ti like the Radeon HD 6970, or GTX 570 or 580 could be found for rather cheap used, but they all draw a lot of power and need more than a 430 Watt power supply.
 
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The older gen cards wouldn't be limited by my cpu would they?

I think the 750Ti is still looking like the best option so far. After looking around the net I can see it's not a top performing card, goes to show I really need an upgrade but after viewing a comparison of the 5770 to 750Ti the difference is pretty big so hopefully it would be worth it.

 
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Yes I just got this chip second hand recently and am experimenting with overclocks as we speak. I have overclocked to 3.0ghz with 10x multiplier and 1.375v and ran prime for a few minutes with no errors but temps got up to 75, 75, 70, 70 and got worried so stopped, Idle temps were 48, 48, 45, 46. I'm on stock aluminium heatsink, are those temps concerning? should I back off and get better cooling? Fired up Dragon Age with that oc and wasn't so sure, maybe the ram didn't like being 100mhz higher..

Whats your opinion on the graphics card?
 
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You definitely need better cooling, you can't get good overclocks on the stock CPU cooler. There are faster cards than the 750Ti, but I have a hard time recommending them without a power supply upgrade as well, especially if you are throwing an overclock on your CPU as well, which will also increase your power draw.
 
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If you can get a good overclock on your CPU you may be able to move up to an R9 270 or a GTX 660 and not be held back too badly by your CPU. Anything beyond that probably would be held back, even with an overclock and probably wouldn't be worthwhile unless you plan to transplant that card to a new build.
 
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Yes, will look at cooler. I'm trying to get this machine running the best possible until I can upgrade hopefully without spending too much.

Currently I have it running at 2.8ghz but I'm getting max temps of 65 in prime, should i just go back to stock until a cooler?
 
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Cool, I'll have too look at that option.


 
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A really good 550 Watt unit is good enough for any single GPU system, wattages higher than that you mostly go for if you want to do SLI or Crossfire. Neither of the two PSUs you listed aren't the greatest, most CoolerMaster power supplies aren't very good, and Corsair's lower end power supplies aren't great either, though their higher end ones are good e.g TX, HX or AX series.
 
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I think i'm going to head with the Seasonic SSR-650RT S12G Series 650W maybe the 550w

I can't see needing a 750w to be necessary, i'm sure i'll be going with a single gpu but would the 650w allow for a dual gpu option if something changed?

I would be interested in a ssd one day and possibly a faster sata drive, does the 650w still look like the right option?

With the graphics card i'm thinking of heading with the r9 270, it seems to beat the gtx 660 in comparison. Would a gtx 760 be cpu limited?

I got a hint that maybe you favour nvidia over amd, any reason why? I think the closest nvidia card in comparison to the r9 270 is the gtx 760, is that right?

 
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650 Watt can do SLI or Crossfire on midrange cards, but won't provide enough juice if you want two put two high end cards together. The only high end SLI or Crossfire setup you might get away with doing would be two GTX 970s in SLI simply because the 970 uses a lot less power than pretty much any other high end card on the market right now. If you think you're going to take the plunge on high end multi-GPU and are going to drop $1000+ on graphics cards at some point in the future, you may want to go for a 750 Watt unit.

SSDs actually use less power than a mechanical hard drive, and mechanical drives don't use a whole lot of power to begin with. Hard drives don't really become a significant factor in power consumption until you're running an array of 4 or more of them.

The GTX 760 is faster than the 660 and performs a bit faster compared to the R9 270x (somewhere in between the R9 270x and R9 280 most of the time, though this will vary by game, titles with Mantle support tend to favour the R9 270x over the GTX 760), it will likely be held back by your CPU, so I wouldn't necessarily bother getting it if it's going to cost you a lot extra.

The R9 270 is a decent card, I had one back when it was called the Radeon HD 7870. It won't do ultra on the latest titles, but it will be a huge improvement over your current card. I was mostly suggesting Nvidia before because you had a low wattage power supply of unknown make, and the GTX 750Ti uses a lot less power than its AMD counterparts.
 
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Would the r9 270x be worth the extra over the r9 270? I read somewhere the r9 270 can be easily overclocked to 270x specs.

Any particular brand to look for? I notice some have copper heatsinks while some don't.
 
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The 270x is just an overclocked 270, so it isn't really worth the extra money if there's more than say a $10 price difference between the two. As for brands, Sapphire tends to be the best for AMD cards, Asus and Gigabyte are decent too. I've personally had a pretty bad experience with MSI, so I wouldn't recommend them. I've heard that XFX cards tend to run hot and be rather noisy, so that may be one to avoid.
 
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Looking at some benchmarks both 270's can overclock but the 270x will overclock better and has slightly lower noise and temp levels.

There's someone selling a brand new Sapphire 270x for $240 compared to $280 elsewhere. Any opinions?
 
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