Which GPU choice for flight sims and general usage.

[STERION 2014]

Gifted a i3-2100 rig with 8gb ddr3 1660 ram, 350 max watts psu. I have a choice of GPU's which came with it. A HD5450 and Asus gtx260 along with intel 2000 of course. I fly mostly FSX. My question is would you be so kind as to advise the best choice of gpu please? Many thanks.

 

[10tacle]

I have FSX with a lot of add-ons (payware aircraft, weather & clouds, airport scenery, sounds, etc.). Microsoft's Flight Sim series responds mostly to CPU speed and has for each version since I first got FS98. Your GPU will not make much of a difference. But FSX does respond better to Nvidia GPUs over AMDs. AMD video cards in MSFS are notorious for stuttering.

You really need a faster CPU like say a Sandy Bridge i5 2500K or i7 2600K if you can still find one out there for sale that wasn't abused. I get a massive FPS boost running my i5 4690K up to 4.7GHz over the stock 3.5GHz. That's crucial to heavy frame rate hitting scenery and aircraft. But choose Nvidia over AMD for FSX no matter what.

 

[cryoburner]

Aside from any possible optimizations for one brand of card or the other, both cards are fairly old, but the GTX 260 should offer much better performance. It was an upper-mid range card when it came out, while the HD 5450 was an ultra-low end card that originally retailed for around $50 (seven years ago). Either card would outperform the integrated chipset though.

The only issue I would see with the GTX 260, is that its power draw under load is much higher than the other options, with about a 170 to 200 watt TDP, depending on which revision it is, which added to the rest of the system might be cutting things a bit close with a PSU rated for 350 watts.

If buying a new graphics card for the system were an option, pretty much any low-end GPU from the current generation would be faster, such as a $70-$75 GT 1030, and that card would demand far less from the power supply, at less than 30 watts under load.

 

[STERION 2014]

Thanks very much for those informative replies. Ive drawn from them your comments on Nvidia, the 260 power draw and the cpu. Rather than pay out for a better psu to fuel an older and high tdp card, a newer one must be a better choice. I'll also check out a change in cpu. Thanks very much, for your advice both, that would be a better update than my original choices, brilliant advice.