Upgrading Radeon 5850 (8 year old system that used to be good)

[gaiusgracchus]

I have a very old custom built computer with the following specs (pasted below from the original order confirmation):

Processor: Intel® Core™ i7 920 Processor (4x 2.66GHz/8MB L3 Cache)

Motherboard: Asus P6T SE -- Intel X58 Chipset CrossFire Supported w/7.1 Sound, Triple-Channel DDR3, Gb LAN, S-ATA Raid, USB 2.0, Triple PCI-E MB

Memory: 6 GB [2 GB X3] DDR3-1333 Triple Memory Module - Corsair Value or Major Brand

Video Card ATI Radeon HD 5850 - 1GB - Single Card

Power supply is 650W.


I assume that the best bang for my buck would be upgrading the video card? Or maybe finding a cheap, identical 5850 to use in parallel? I really just want to spend a few hundred dollars max to make this system just good enough to last until summer (I will be done with my MBA then and will have more money to buy a proper new system that I won't have time to use). I really just want to be able to play Total War: Warhammer at more than 10 FPS.

I do not want to go through the hassle or expense of changing motherboards.

 

[The Paladin]

if your limiting yourself as a patch and upgrade later than I would suggest putting your money into a video card that will be passed along to the new system later on it is all that make sense at this point. get a 1050ti or a 1060 6gb and you will be happy for this system and the next. that is my suggestion.

 

[gaiusgracchus]

if your limiting yourself as a patch and upgrade later than I would suggest putting your money into a video card that will be passed along to the new system later on it is all that make sense at this point. get a 1050ti or a 1060 6gb and you will be happy for this system and the next. that is my suggestion.

Will that work with an earlier version of the PCI Express? I understand that there's different iterations of PCI-E nowadays and I assume that would be problem (i.e. you couldn't plug a PCI-E 1.0 card into an AGP slot, right?).

 

[The Paladin]

Thank you for bringing that up for inspection your quite right your bus for the video card and slot are PCIe 2.0 x16.
So it will not be a problems as all newer PCIE x16 3.0 cards will downgrade to pcie x16 2.0 and work at that speed. and will not damage board or card to do so.

Ref: https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/P6T_SE/specifications/