Worth Upgrading my Graphics Card?

[0liver12]

Hi,

This is my current spec (bought it around 7-8 years ago)

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 "Energy Efficient SLACR 95W Edition" 2.40GHz (1066FSB)
EVGA nForce 680i SLi (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard (122-CK-NF68-A1)
Western Digital Caviar SE16 400GB SATA-II 16MB Cache - OEM (WD4000AAKS)
OCZ GameXStream 700w Silent SLI Ready ATX2 Power Supply
OCZ SLI-Ready Edition 4GB (4x1GB) PC2-8500C5 1066MHz Dual Channel (OCZ2N1066SR2GK)
GeForce 8800 GT x 2 Sli'd 512MB GDDR3 HDTV/Dual DVI (PCI-Express)


Running on Windows Vista Ultimate and a 720p monitor. I'm currently looking for upgrade the ram to 8gb and change the 8800GT's to a Radeon R7 250x or a Nvidia 730GT Gddr5. I am aware that there are also issues with using the R7 250x on a PCI Express 1.1 slot. The machine isn't primary for gaming but using unity and the unreal 4 engine to develop on. (I'm currently experimenting with both)

I'm hoping to spend around £120 to keep this going for at least another year as I don't have enough money to buy whole new machine.

My question is, is the upgrade worth it? Do I stick with my 8800GT's or get a different gfx?

Thanks,
Oli

 

[thismafiaguy]

If you upgrade to a GPU around the £120 mark, it will very likely be bottlenecked by the rest of your system. You should still see good performance gains, but the GPU will not be able to fully stretch its legs. That said, you could get a GPU now and roll with it despite the bottlenecking, and upgrade the rest of your system as soon as you have the budget for it.

 

[0liver12]

I was only looking at spending around £50 to £65 on a new GPU with rest being spent on upgrading the ram to 8gb.

Would there be large increase in performance if I replaced my 8800gt's with one 730gt gddr5?

 

[thismafiaguy]

I wouldn't recommend an upgrade to the 730, those are the low-end cards designed only to perform the most basic functions of a GPU, and will not do very well in gaming and development. In that case it would be best if you stay with your current hardware until you have the budget to build a new system, otherwise the benefits aren't really worth the cost. The rest of your system is quite a few generations old, so it will be very difficult to achieve a balanced performance with any upgrades at the moment.

You could look into building a system with an AMD APU, and that will be sufficient for a lot of games at 720p or 1080p. It's probably one of the most cost-effective solutions of building a PC because you will not have to get a CPU and GPU separately.

 

[0liver12]

I was afraid you were going say that haha. Thank you for your help. Would there be an increase in performance with 8GB (I have Vista 64bit) as my plan was to use my two monitors for working.

 

[thismafiaguy]

Having dual monitors doesn't inherently demand more RAM. 4GB is a fairly healthy amount for Vista, although 8GB is considered optimal for productivity. You would only benefit from having more RAM if you were running more programs simultaneously as a result of having dual monitors to display more windows.

If your system is struggling in any particular way more so than others, perhaps you could remedy the issue by making an upgrade to a certain component. But for a general upgrade in system responsiveness, you could look into adding a solid state drive to run your operating system, and use your hard drive as storage. A 250GB Samsung 850 EVO for £100 would be a very good upgrade that you could easily carry over to your next system. They generally last a very long time and are more reliable than traditional hard drives, on top of the fact that they are tremendously faster at reading and writing data. Lastly, I would recommend also upgrading your operating system to Windows 7 or 8.1, as you'll then be eligible for a free upgrade to Windows 10 when it launches later this year.

 

[coozie7]

The R7 250x is a better option than the 730GT, prices seem to be hovering around the £65 mark.
The bad new s is that you'll probably need to go through E-bay for the memory, 4Gb (2x2Gb) kits are around £55 new, although a quick look shows CCL seems to be having a bit of a sale: http://www.cclonline.com/category/408/PC-Components/Memory/Desktop-Memory/attributeslist/1078003/
Check the voltage of any parts you have in mind, not all motherboards like running the memory over 1.8v!

 

[0liver12]

Thank you for your help. It is very much appreciated.

Oli