PC upgrade advice.

[w_allcoat]

Hi, back in 2015 I built my son a pc, actually surprised how easy it was.

He has now got £250 of Xmas money burning a hole in his pocket and wants a new graphics card.

The current system is running an APU and after reading a bit over the last couple of days, getting a graphics card to run in crossfire the improvement is minimal.

The current specs are:
AMD A10 7850K

Asus A88XM-PLUS Motherboard

Corsair Builder Series CXM 500W.

HyperX FURY Series 8GB (2x 4GB) DDR3

Zalman T3 Mini M-ATX/M-ITX Tower Case

WD 1TB 3.5 inch Internal Hard Drive

And a SSD but can't remember which one.

Any advice greatly appreciated.

 

[Finstar]

Getting a new gpu would show the highest performance gains though the old APU would be a bottleneck.

I'd recommend getting:
https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/product/WwQRsY/sapphire-radeon-rx-570-4gb-pulse-itx-video-card-11266-06-20g

And save up the rest towards a new Motherboard+RAM+CPU.

 

[eglang03]

You’d be right in saying that crossfire doesn’t work all that well because it’s not optimized, but since your running on an apu it’s like a graphics card build in to the processor(cpu) so installing a physical graphics card wouldn’t cause it to run in crossfire. It would drastically improve the performance in games and such. In order to crossfire you must have two identical graphics cards, so you should be 100% fine.


Also, you said he has £250 of Christmas money to burn, you/he might not want to blow it all on a gpu, Id suggest for him to look into investing in other parts of his computer like the processor, maybe upgrading to ryzen. If he chooses to do that I would reccomend saving up some more money as the ram he has is ddr3 and modern systems utilize ddr4 but the prices have gone up 200%+ for ram. I would say to go with an intel pentium g4560 with the cheapest b250 motherboard you can find (m-atx) then get the cheapest 8gb of ram you can find(ddr4 2133+) and spend what’s left on a gpu such as the rx 570 or gtx 1050(ti)