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

gaiusgracchus

Prominent
Dec 26, 2017
2
0
510
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.

 
Solution
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.
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.
 
Solution


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?).
 
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/